Memory leak in games

[Dimetime35c]

I just watched Linus techquickie about memory eaks and I want to know. How does that pertain to gaming? One game I played Planetside 2 was notorious for having memory leakage to the point it would eventually slow the game down or even crash it. I don't understand how a leak could cause a programs to crash though?? If I recall correctly the specific leak had something to do either with VRAM or RAM. How can a ram issue crash a game??

[Guest]

A program needs free memory to run. An intensive workload like gaming won't work on a pagefile.

[arronleeds]

my gpu has memory leak on the new ark game, reporting 4.5gb usage  on a 4gb card, it stutters but the fps isnt that low.

[Dimetime35c]

A program needs free memory to run. An intensive workload like gaming won't work on a pagefile.

Okay yeah I get that. But how does a memory leak in VRAM even happen? Doesn't a game constantly request and drop VRAM sense it has to display many images? Would it just rewrite over the data on the VRAM fast enough that a leak wouldn't matter?

[Guest]

Okay yeah I get that. But how does a memory leak in VRAM even happen? Doesn't a game constantly request and drop VRAM sense it has to display many images? Would it just rewrite over the data on the VRAM fast enough that a leak wouldn't matter?

A memory leak is a bug where the memory isn't being cleared of data that is no longer needed.