Non paged pool eating 6 gigs of RAM

Hi,

My laptop has 8 gigs of RAM installed but while playing BF3 on my laptop last night the hard drive suddenly went up to 100% use and the game screen halted. I opened up my task manager to see what was going on and saw that 7 gigs of RAM was in use while BF3 was not running. In shock, I looked through all processes in task manager but was unable to find the culprit. The processes altogether add up to no more than 1.5 gigs of RAM. Thinking that this was some kind of freak accident I rebooted and everything was fine again. Background RAM usage went back to under 2 gigs. But now when I fired up BF3 again today within a few minutes the same issue surfaced up. I quit the game, restarted the machine, fired up BF3, same issue a third time. I am struggling to figure out how to tackle this issue. I can't pinpoint to any visible process that is eating up most of available RAM.







This problem only surfaces when I play Battlefield 3. Last time when I played it (two weeks ago), this was not an issue. Nor does this issue surface when I use some other memory intensive application, like Flash CS6 or a different game. Any ideas on what is going on and how I can tackle this issue?

My spces:
laptop: Alienware M17xR4
CPU: 3610 i7
OS: Windows 8x64
RAM: 8 gigs

 

Are you doing anything different than usual in BF3, for example, maybe you're playing on a map that has a memory leak. Given that it is limited to BF3, that seems the most likely option to me.

You could try uninstalling and reinstalling BF3 too, if something in your installation got corrupted that should fix it.

 

Sounds like faulty application development (a weird one, at that). As tijo recommended, try uninstalling/reinstalling the game. Maybe for assurance purposes, you can try running MemTest86+ to test your RAM.

 

Thank you both for your replies. I was able to resolve this issue by updating AMD drivers to latest beta version. Judging by threads on EA battlefield 3 forum, a fair number of people with AMD cards are having this issue after installing latest BF3 expansion, aftermath. Updating catalyst drivers to 12.11 beta was suggested as one of the solutions and it worked in my case.