Jeez. So much being thrown around in here. lol
And here I am still running on 551.31… LOL
Just a couple of points after spending the past year helping with problems:
While it doesn’t fix everyone’s issue, the use of the driver 561.09 does indeed work for most situations.
Glad to read about an issue with the driver and settings, that is something to log into my noggin for later.
Memory leak. Where do I begin with that one?
Okay.
I have spent some considerable amount of time debunking this. And there are a couple caveats and reasons why it looks like a memory leak:
Not everyone runs the same things along side the game. Some have multiple monitors, might be running music, video, websites, or lord knows what else. Some others might have little to nothing running alongside the game. (I fall into that category myself)
All these things can impact your memory usage.
Virtual memory. This is the committed value under Task Manager->Performance->Memory.
Here’s the skinny:
That value is the sum of your current page file settings and your physical memory. Now, in a normal system with automatic page file management, this can change depending on usage. For years, I never even enabled a page file as having a lot of memory negated the need for it. In fact I played this game without a swap file from launch till January 31th of this year. Why did I have to have a swap file? Because I started getting out of memory errors after I upgraded the video card to a 4080 Super from a 3070 Ti.
So.
How much memory your GPU has will impact severely your virtual memory usage for this game.
Why this game, I don’t know. But my solution was to set a fixed swap file size. Note, I mean a swap file that no longer dynamically adjusts it size, as this was also insufficient to keep up with the virtual memory demands of the game.
Now as to the leak statement.
A leak is a case where a program will eat up memory till you run out and crash the system.
So.
If your system has a low amount of virtual memory, yes this game will eat it up and you will crash, making it look like a leak!
However.
If you have a large enough swap file set and plenty of virtual memory (48GB to 64GB total virtual memory) the game will not fill that up and crash you. In fact the game will flatten out and stabilize, IF you have enough space set. I have tested this time and again, there is no real leak, only the appearance of one under certain conditions.
But, if you are running a lot of programs in the background (especially web browsers with a ton of tabs open) you will increase the chance of running out of virtual memory again, due to not having enough.
So some adjustments can help stabilize the game, certainly.
Should we be needing to do this?
No, we shouldn’t have to be going through these lengths at all! But we have little choice in the matter. It comes down to implementing some setting changes or driver corrections or, waiting till Blizzard acknowledges the issues and properly fixes them…
That’s all I had to say. Its late, I’m off to bed.