If a game doesn’t get to use the right amount of RAM, it lags. You may also experience issues like a black screen or sudden crashes in the middle of your gameplay. In such a case, you will definitely want to allocate more RAM to the desired game.
But Windows lets the dynamic memory be freely used by any applications/games. So, it isn’t necessary to allocate RAM specifically for a game from users, and neither will you find any specific settings to allocate a certain amount of RAM for any game.
However, there are some settings you can tweak to ensure more memory is used by the desired application.
How to Allocate More RAM?
Before moving on to play with the settings, you can try to close other applications. It will help the RAM, CPU, and GPU focus on your game rather than diverge resources.
Then, you can proceed to the listed methods to optimize RAM usage for your game:
Specific Game Settings
All the games are programmed to take a definite amount of memory at an instance to run smoothly. Most of them would automatically use the required amount of RAM. But depending upon the game you are playing or the app you are using, you may have the privilege to increase the RAM occupancy.
Some applications will provide such a feature within their toolbars, majorly in the Edit tab. There, memory settings can be manually set under the given limits.
But for other Games/Applications, there may be not-so-simple specific procedures, which you will be able to find out by searching on the Internet.
Moreover, games consist of other settings to tweak, like render quality, resolution, fps, etc. If you increase the values of such settings, games will automatically utilize more amount of resources.
Allocate Disk Cache
Except for the direct RAM allocation, you can allocate a certain portion of your RAM or hard disk to act as cache memory for your game. This will help to load the game files faster by keeping them temporarily ready. You can follow the steps below to allocate disk cache size for your game:
- Right-click on the desktop icon of your game and choose Properties.
- Go to the Shortcut tab.
- Add
-disk-cache-size=<value>within the Target text field at the last of the Path target without any space.
The value should be in bytes, so if you want to allocate around 1GB of disk cache to your game, replace ‘<value>’ with 1 followed by 9 zeros. Example:
-disk-cache-size=1000000000 - Click on Apply and then OK.
End Unnecessary task
Other than that, you can end all the unnecessary tasks running in your background. These tasks tend to take up RAM and CPU, causing their actual capacity to limit.
Though prioritizing the desired games will allocate resources over those background processes, ending the unwanted tasks will always help to optimize performance.
You can follow the steps to end tasks from Task Manager:
- Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager.
- Within the Processes tab, right-click on the process/application you want to stop and choose End task.
- Do the same with other unnecessary processes.
Halt Startup Applications
Now, even if you stop the background processes once, some will start after rebooting. It is because such processes have been enabled with permissions to startup automatically. It is mundane to end such processes each time from the task Manager, rather, you can disable them from starting automatically.
Follow the steps mentioned below to disable them:
- Again, open the Task Manager and go to the Startup tab.
- Right-click on the process and click Disable.
- Repeat the same with the unwanted startup process.
Prioritize from Task Manager
Windows Task Manager lets you prioritize processes with more resources. Though it is not any direct or specific allocation of RAM, it will let the process prioritize within the CPU. Due to this, the application is likely to get priority in RAM holding as well during conflicting scenarios.
To prioritize a game, you will have to follow the given steps:
- Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc to open Task Manager.
- Go to the Details tab.
- Right-click on the desired game, and choose High from Set priority.
(Realtime priority shouldn’t be set, as it will imbalance other processes queued to the CPU)
- Hit on the Change priority button.
You will also have to change the priority of the other processes related to that game.
Should I Allocate More RAM to a Game?
As mentioned earlier, no Windows settings will provide you with the settings to allocate RAM to a game. But even if in-game settings let you do so, you shouldn’t be proactively doing it. It is because allocating extensive memory to some games will hamper the operations of other mandatory processes.
So, depending upon your physical capacity of RAM sticks, you can allocate it to a certain application. With a higher amount of physical memory and a suitable amount of memory assignment, you will face fewer problems. Or, you may have to increase your RAM capacity physically.
Moreover, if you are experiencing slow gameplay, there might be issues other than the RAM allocation. More often, problems in gameplay are the result of a faulty GPU. May it be hardware inabilities or some other configuration issues, GPUs are the major causes of laggy gameplay, poor quality, FPS jumps, screen tearing, etc.
Or the processing part, the CPU can cause issues if it is being extensively used without a proper cooling system. Moreover, the required specs for the game you’re playing can be checked on their official documentation. Unmet requirements can’t be fixed without hardware upgrades.
Consider upgrading your hardware if their specs turned out to be the weak links in your smooth gameplay experience.
