17.4 using more memory, crashing my 8gb RAM constantly now

[Mephistopheles]

I've been running all other versions fine on my Asus G75 with only 8GB RAM, 675MX card I7 laptop. I optimize settings to get around 40-45fps but don't really have issues with "Your computer is low on memory" and the game crashing because of overtaxed RAM...until now in 17.4.

 

FWIW, my FPS seems 20% better now, but it's taxing my memory like crazy and I'm getting microstutter, freezing, and crashing nonstop. I've tried disabling things like that memory texture streaming, which helps a bit but it still crashes and freezes. I was just wondering if anyone else noticed that it appears that FPS might be better, but at the expense of a LOT more memory use now, which is just too much for an 8GB RAM rig.

[Naz]

I've been running all other versions fine on my Asus G75 with only 8GB RAM, 675MX card I7 laptop. I optimize settings to get around 40-45fps but don't really have issues with "Your computer is low on memory" and the game crashing because of overtaxed RAM...until now in 17.4.

 

FWIW, my FPS seems 20% better now, but it's taxing my memory like crazy and I'm getting microstutter, freezing, and crashing nonstop. I've tried disabling things like that memory texture streaming, which helps a bit but it still crashes and freezes. I was just wondering if anyone else noticed that it appears that FPS might be better, but at the expense of a LOT more memory use now, which is just too much for an 8GB RAM rig.

 

You want to enable texture streaming if you want to lower ram usage.

[Mephistopheles]

You want to enable texture streaming if you want to lower ram usage.

 

I've tried it both ways. But the way it's described, if TS is enabled, it puts less load on the gfx card and more load onto RAM, which I don't want.

[avad]

my computer has 4gb ram. its a desktop computer with a dedicated graphic card (radeon 7850, 2 gb) not a laptop.

 

in previous releases (v17s and v16s) i sometimes had some problems/crashes occuring depending on game version. most likely because of memory leaks in the game or programming errors related to this. example in one of the later v16s when using a forge i lost connection to online games ~66% of the time but like all such things it got fixed. another one is that "easy anti cheat" gives me a error message every time i close the game.

 

17.4 Experimental B4 atm works flawless for the few hours i played it. texture streaming is ON. maybe your mobile GPU causes your problem? or something else then a plain RAM issue?

[Mephistopheles]

my computer has 4gb ram. its a desktop computer with a dedicated graphic card (radeon 7850, 2 gb) not a laptop.

 

in previous releases (v17s and v16s) i sometimes had some problems/crashes occuring depending on game version. most likely because of memory leaks in the game or programming errors related to this. example in one of the later v16s when using a forge i lost connection to online games ~66% of the time but like all such things it got fixed. another one is that "easy anti cheat" gives me a error message every time i close the game.

 

17.4 Experimental B4 atm works flawless for the few hours i played it. texture streaming is ON. maybe your mobile GPU causes your problem? or something else then a plain RAM issue?

 

My GPU is a 3GB 670MX, which handled all other versions fine. My FPS is higher in 17.4, which obviously points to the GPU not being the issue. The only issue is running out of RAM, which did not happen at higher settings on previous versions.

[Cadamier]

Try increasing your swap file. Ideally you want your OS on one drive, the game on another drive and your swap file on yet another drive, but that's virtually impossible with a laptop. But since it worked before that might help. I have noticed that from A16 to A17 memory had increased a bit so again this might help.

[Naz]

I've tried it both ways. But the way it's described, if TS is enabled, it puts less load on the gfx card and more load onto RAM, which I don't want.

 

From my understanding disabling texture streaming means all assets are loaded into memory in full resolution this is fine if you have enough ram/vram however enabling texture streaming lets the game use lower resolution textures in the distance where you wouldn't notice the low res, this lowers the games memory usage but has some cpu overhead. This means if you have the ram disable it and get a little bit of performance, if not enable it and the game should use less ram.

 

also check your ram usage before launching the game to make sure you've not got stuff in the background hogging all your ram.

[Mephistopheles]

From my understanding disabling texture streaming means all assets are loaded into memory in full resolution this is fine if you have enough ram/vram however enabling texture streaming lets the game use lower resolution textures in the distance where you wouldn't notice the low res, this lowers the games memory usage but has some cpu overhead. This means if you have the ram disable it and get a little bit of performance, if not enable it and the game should use less ram.

 

also check your ram usage before launching the game to make sure you've not got stuff in the background hogging all your ram.

 

Hmm, would be nice if we had some confirmation or a better explanation of this new graphics setting toggle from the devs, because it's a bit confusing. FWIW though, I went ahead and played around with some more settings that I normally don't like to compromise with. Strangely enough, I found that changing from Full Texture quality to 1/4 didn't really make the game any uglier AT ALL. But the stuttering and freezing did improve. I also lowered the LOD distance to like 50% from 100%. I also put UMA textures on lowest, and didn't see any degradation of graphics appearance, but these changes, collectively, did help with memory usage. I still get it when opening containers andI do see some weird artifacts like crops changing their appearance back and forth with some "appearance border" at around 5m away.

 

Also, one more thing worth noting is since 17.4, and never noticed before, when I walk into an area, most of my recollections involve outdoor areas with lots of "decorations" like pallets and boxes and stuff like that. When I walk around that kind of area, the decorations don't spawn until I get really close, maybe 5-20m, it depends. This happens no matter what my LOD, LOD Distance, and all other settings are set to. This never happened before and makes me think it's something that is hardcoded that is supposed to maybe help conserve resources, but it breaks immersion at best, and at worst, may even be causing issues with memory having to constantly decide if those decorations should be hidden or visible based on my distance from them. I don't know, just thought I'd mention it in case anyone else has noticed this.

[Naz]

Hmm, would be nice if we had some confirmation or a better explanation of this new graphics setting toggle from the devs, because it's a bit confusing. FWIW though, I went ahead and played around with some more settings that I normally don't like to compromise with. Strangely enough, I found that changing from Full Texture quality to 1/4 didn't really make the game any uglier AT ALL. But the stuttering and freezing did improve. I also lowered the LOD distance to like 50% from 100%. I also put UMA textures on lowest, and didn't see any degradation of graphics appearance, but these changes, collectively, did help with memory usage. I still get it when opening containers andI do see some weird artifacts like crops changing their appearance back and forth with some "appearance border" at around 5m away.

 

Also, one more thing worth noting is since 17.4, and never noticed before, when I walk into an area, most of my recollections involve outdoor areas with lots of "decorations" like pallets and boxes and stuff like that. When I walk around that kind of area, the decorations don't spawn until I get really close, maybe 5-20m, it depends. This happens no matter what my LOD, LOD Distance, and all other settings are set to. This never happened before and makes me think it's something that is hardcoded that is supposed to maybe help conserve resources, but it breaks immersion at best, and at worst, may even be causing issues with memory having to constantly decide if those decorations should be hidden or visible based on my distance from them. I don't know, just thought I'd mention it in case anyone else has noticed this.

 

I noticed the decoration pop in as well but in 17.2 I think the tree quality option also controls other things when I turned that to high the pop in stopped.

[Mephistopheles]

Just played a bit more and found that things were fine until I was driving through a city and got major stutter and freezing. Looking at the console I found that it all related to when long lists of sleepers were being spawned near me. Here is what I hope will show a 30 second freeze just to load up some nearby zombies, this happened continuously in the city.

 

_{2019-05-29T18:59:16 1215.325 INF Time: 16.03m FPS: 63.55 Heap: 3498.3MB Max: 4550.2MB Chunks: 242 CGO: 130 Ply: 1 Zom: 5 Ent: 10 (82) Items: 9 CO: 1 RSS: 6363.5MB}

_{2019-05-29T18:59:16 1215.742 INF 976.7253 SleeperVolume -2120, 43, -382. Spawning at -2069, 45, -349, group 'sleeperHordeStageGS46', class zombieMoe, count 5}

_{2019-05-29T18:59:17 1215.834 INF 976.8192 SleeperVolume -2120, 43, -382. Spawning at -2107, 45, -362, group 'sleeperHordeStageGS46', class zombieJoe, count 5}

_{2019-05-29T18:59:17 1215.937 INF 976.9216 SleeperVolume -2120, 43, -382. Spawning at -2097, 44, -366, group 'sleeperHordeStageGS46', class zombieMoe, count 5}

_{2019-05-29T18:59:17 1216.046 INF 977.03 SleeperVolume -2120, 43, -382. Spawning at -2085, 44, -369, group 'sleeperHordeStageGS46', class zombieDarlene, count 5}

_{2019-05-29T18:59:17 1216.140 INF 977.124 SleeperVolume -2120, 43, -382. Spawning at -2095, 45, -335, group 'sleeperHordeStageGS46', class zombieUtilityWorker, count 5}

_{2019-05-29T18:59:17 1216.251 INF 977.2278 SleeperVolume -2120, 43, -382. Spawning at -2068, 45, -373, group 'sleeperHordeStageGS46', class zombieMarlene, count 5}

_{2019-05-29T18:59:17 1216.335 INF 977.3199 SleeperVolume -2120, 43, -382. Spawning at -2073, 44, -369, group 'sleeperHordeStageGS46', class zombieJoe, count 12}

_{2019-05-29T18:59:17 1216.441 INF 977.425 SleeperVolume -2120, 43, -382. Spawning at -2073, 44, -334, group 'sleeperHordeStageGS46', class zombieYo, count 12}

_{2019-05-29T18:59:22 1221.633 INF 982.1394 SleeperVolume -2123, 44, -475. Spawning at -2102, 45, -466, group 'ZombieGhostTownGroupGS1', class zombieMarlene, count 14}

_{2019-05-29T18:59:22 1221.733 INF 982.2395 SleeperVolume -2123, 44, -475. Spawning at -2115, 46, -441, group 'ZombieGhostTownGroupGS1', class zombieSteveCrawler, count 14}

_{2019-05-29T18:59:23 1221.839 INF 982.3455 SleeperVolume -2123, 44, -475. Spawning at -2087, 46, -468, group 'ZombieGhostTownGroupGS1', class zombieSteveCrawler, count 14}

_{2019-05-29T18:59:23 1221.949 INF 982.4559 SleeperVolume -2123, 44, -475. Spawning at -2100, 46, -464, group 'ZombieGhostTownGroupGS1', class zombieJoe, count 14}

_{2019-05-29T18:59:23 1222.034 INF 982.5411 SleeperVolume -2123, 44, -475. Spawning at -2092, 46, -468, group 'ZombieGhostTownGroupGS1', class zombieArlene, count 14}

_{2019-05-29T18:59:23 1222.137 INF 982.6437 SleeperVolume -2123, 44, -475. Spawning at -2103, 50, -465, group 'ZombieGhostTownGroupGS1', class zombieSteveCrawler, count 14}

_{2019-05-29T18:59:23 1222.244 INF 982.7437 SleeperVolume -2123, 44, -475. Spawning at -2103, 46, -441, group 'ZombieGhostTownGroupGS1', class zombieArlene, count 14}

_{2019-05-29T18:59:23 1222.347 INF 982.8536 SleeperVolume -2123, 44, -475. Spawning at -2089, 46, -452, group 'ZombieGhostTownGroupGS1', class zombieOldTimer, count 19}

_{2019-05-29T18:59:46 1245.735 INF VehicleManager Save}

_{2019-05-29T18:59:47 1246.019 INF Time: 16.53m FPS: 62.67 Heap: 3616.4MB Max: 4550.2MB Chunks: 242 CGO: 160 Ply: 1 Zom: 10 Ent: 13 (118) Items: 17 CO: 1 RSS: 6394.9MB}

 

 

Then I went to a POI and opened up a container and got a 3 minute freeze that resulted in my first death on this playthrough.

 

_{2019-05-29T19:03:47 1486.257 INF Time: 20.54m FPS: 52.37 Heap: 3889.5MB Max: 4550.2MB Chunks: 285 CGO: 185 Ply: 1 Zom: 31 Ent: 39 (164) Items: 25 CO: 8 RSS: 6367.1MB}

_{2019-05-29T19:03:59 1498.299 INF UnloadUnusedAssets 20.20682}

_{Unloading 3 Unused Serialized files (Serialized files now loaded: 5)}

 

_{Unloading 31352 unused Assets to reduce memory usage. Loaded Objects now: 487262.}

_{Total: 105179.517705 ms (FindLiveObjects: 37654.843017 ms CreateObjectMapping: 19.774217 ms MarkObjects: 65458.013409 ms DeleteObjects: 2046.886632 ms)}

 

_{2019-05-29T19:06:03 1622.146 INF Time: 21.04m FPS: 36.79 Heap: 4003.1MB Max: 4550.2MB Chunks: 285 CGO: 186 Ply: 1 Zom: 31 Ent: 37 (165) Items: 25 CO: 8 RSS: 6287.9MB}

_{2019-05-29T19:06:30 1649.755 INF GMSG: Player '¤Ninja¤' died}

 

Notice that the UnloadUnusedAssets supposedly only took 2046ms, but actually froze my game for a full 3 minutes.

 

I also noticed that every time VehicleManagerSave runs, it stutters and freezes, which is every 2 minutes.

 

Here's the top of my output log showing my settings.

[Cadamier]

7 Days to Die 17.4 does eat 9.2GB of ram on my desktop.

[asmosnuts]

Playing a 16k random gen map and showing a pretty consistant 6gb ram used cpu never above 50% usage. Strangely enough first attempt at generating a map, cpu at 97% and 24gb memory crashed twice then seemed to settle with no further problems.