Having FPS drops in game due to high memory usage

Hey all i am a complete novice when it comes to computers so ill do my best to explain what started happening recently:

I bought my laptop for about $1300 last summer and it was performing real well was even able to stream and play at same time. Recently (week or so ago) and i brought up to my guilds discord and they told me to check out task manager to see how my laptop is running. i shared some screnshots with them and they said i have 12g of RAM and WoW is consuming 4.5 of that but the weird thing is my RAM is at like 88-90% used even though the math doesnt add up when calculating in everything else the laptop has running had several people look at this in discord and they agreed something isnt adding up

Ive been told to try and factory reset my laptop and see if that fixes it.

Tried my best to explain please let me know if any additional info is needed. Any advice is welcomed!

For starters, Task Manager can’t always be trusted. Yeah, it’s built into Windows, but the values are not always accurate.

Are you having any actual problems, or just concerned about the total RAM being used?

So im having issues in game where my fps will be stuttering, if i sit still in a zone my fps can get up to 145-150 but when i start moving my character it’ll drop down to like 55-60 and then ping pong back and forth between 60-80. it sometimes takes as long as a GCD for my game to figure out whats going which has resulted in a death for me in keys.

This issue wasnt always happening either

You might be experiencing either a connection issue or an overheating issue. There are tools to check for both.

Connection: WinMTR
Temperature: HWMonitor

I’ll check out temperature issue because I don’t think it’s a connection issue my ping isn’t very high and it happens on multiple different wifi’s

What’s probably making it not add up is that there’s a chunk being used by the GPU. If the OP is using a graphics card that doesn’t have enough VRAM, it will use a chunk of the RAM. Within your task manager, if you go to the GPU tab, you’ll see dedicated GPU memory and shared GPU memory. While the game is running and while your numbers aren’t adding up, check that page to see how much of the shared ram is being used.

It’s likely that the wow.exe process, within the task manager, doesn’t reflect the extra ram being utilized by the GPU since that’s a system level thing.

What I’d recommend is turning down the game settings to avoid that spillover. A lot of games have a vram meter in the graphics settings page that shows roughly how much they are going to use with current settings, to help avoid issues that happen when you go over(stuttering and fps issues).

Since the OP said they are not tech savvy, I didn’t want to overload them with details. But yes, this is correct.

I’ll take a look at this, would this issue also carry over if I try to close out of the game? Sometimes if I try and close out of the game by going to the tab on the bottom of the screen the game won’t close and I get a pop up that says “not responding do you want to force close or wait for response “

It’s true I’m not lol, but I’ll take any advice and google it and see how I manage!

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You might be having problems with what’s known as memory leaking.

If the regular ram overflows, it will write to what’s known as the page file on your hard drive or ssd, to make more room. The problem with that is that the ssds/hdds are magnitudes slower than your ram. So when you go to close the game, it might be having to clear out the page file, which takes time.

My recommendation is to do a UI reset on WoW because you might have a bad addon that’s causing this or the client might be corrupted.

Then run the repair tool within the battlenet launcher.

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I definitely appreciate the enthusiasm to help fellow community members, but let’s keep in mind that the OP did mention they’re not too tech savvy. For now let’s avoid overcomplicating information and take it one step at a time. I went ahead and hid a bit, but if OP would like to go through it they are free to do so by clicking the dropdown.

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I truly appreciate everyone’s input in this when I get a chance I’m gonna have to try some of this out!

When I had woken up, someone had edited my posts and then locked it (I’ll post the solution on a 3rd party site next time and then just link it.)

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