Memory leak issue

Technical Support
1

Hello, i’ve been having memory leak lately

Overwatch used to take around 4-5gb of RAM even when i played on highest settings possible, but now it builds and builds until my game becomes unplayable. At some point i had 21GB of RAM in use after an hour of playtime.

Is there any fix to this? Searched alot of posts but couldnt find any solution. I have all my drivers and everything up to date.

it is fine in practice mode, but starts happening when i enter any match.

3 Likes
2

Hey Barry

This appears to have been introduced around the February 10
Season 1 (Reign of Talon) patch based on community reports.
The fact that it only happens in live matches and not
practice mode is a key detail — it points to the game
failing to properly clear memory during live match states
rather than a driver or hardware issue on your end.

Worth knowing: this memory leak issue is actually a recurring bug in Overwatch 2 that has been reported since 2024 and consistently reappears after major patches. There are multiple threads on both the US and EU Technical Support forums documenting the same issue going back years. Search “memory leak” on the Technical Support forums to see the full history. You are not the first and unfortunately not the last to deal with this.

Here are some things worth trying while we wait for an
official fix:

  1. Lower Texture Quality one step in Settings → Video
    even if your specs can handle max — this reduces how
    aggressively the game caches assets into RAM

  2. Limit your framerate in Settings → Video → Frame Rate
    — uncapped framerates force the engine to load assets
    faster than it can clear old ones which compounds leaks

  3. Run a Scan and Repair via Battle.net → Overwatch →
    Options — this rules out corrupted cached assets causing
    abnormal memory retention

  4. Disable Discord overlay and close all background
    applications before launching — Discord overlay in
    particular is known to compound Overwatch memory issues

  5. Open Task Manager while playing and note whether it is
    Overwatch.exe itself consuming the RAM or a secondary
    process like Battle.net Helper or a shader cache — this
    helps narrow down the exact source

A few questions that might help narrow it down further:

  • When did this start — was it around February 10, 2026?
  • Are you on Battle.net or Steam client?
  • What GPU are you running? AMD cards in particular have
    shown specific VRAM leak issues post Season 1
  • Is it happening across all modes or specifically Stadium?

None of these are guaranteed fixes — this looks like a
game-side issue that needs a proper patch. But the steps
above should help reduce the severity in the meantime.
Hope it helps and hopefully Blizzard addresses this soon.

2 Likes
3

thanks for the reply.

It started around mid march and having exact same issue on both battle.net launcher and steam client, tried both. GPU is RTX 4080 and this issue happens in pretty much any mode.

I’ve been also having alot of high MS jumps, sometimes to even 250-300. I play World of warcraft, which is another blizzard game and always have stable 45ms there.

Hopefully all this gets fixed somehow cus I’m a competitive player and its basically unplayable.

I’ll search forum for similar posts like you recommended, maybe i’ll find some solution.

UPDATE

Found one solution that worked for both memory leak and MS fix.

Documents/Overwatch/Settings - delete whatever it is in settings. this hopefully helps other people with same issues in future.

4

Having this same issue. I’ve deleted the settings folder but of course it makes another and this is not a permanent fix

1 Like
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