this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
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My PC currently experiences a memory overload if I play ~150mods Skyrim for more than 2 hours straight. I currently have 16gb DDR4, Gtx1660 Nvidia. My thoughts are that the graphics card is the weak link but those are still too big a ticket.
Sadly it may actually be your ram. I had a 1660 until a couple months ago and the card kept up fine, at least for older games. With 16gb of memory though my system kept bottlenecking. Upgrading to 32 was like a breath of fresh air
That's exactly what I'm thinking, newest game I play is 10 years old so I'm not expecting my cards to be out any time soon. I'm just miffed that I said I'd get more ram in December and then AI decided to eat all of it in November.
If it's a leak in a mod and some pages just aren't being accessed at all, then I'd think that the OS might be able to just page them out.
It might be possible to crank up the amount of swap you have and put that swap on a relatively-fast storage device. Preferably NVMe, or maybe SATA-attached SSD. I mean, yeah, SSD prices are up too, but you don't need all that much space to just store swap, and it's vastly cheaper than DRAM.
If you have a spare NVMe slot on your system or a free spot to mount a 2.5 inch SATA drive and SATA plug, should be good.
If you have a free PCIe slot, doing a quick Amazon search, looks like a PCIe card with a beefy heatsink to provide an M.2 slot to mount a single stick of NVMe can be had for $14:
https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-NVMe-PCIe-Aluminum-EC-PCIE/dp/B084GDY2PW
And a 128GB M.2 stick of NVMe for $20:
https://www.amazon.com/GALIMU-128GB-XP2000-Gen4x4-XP2000F128GInternal/dp/B0FY4CQRYF
I have no idea the degree to which "lots of cheap, fast swap" helps. It will probably depend a lot on a particular use case. In some cases, probably about as good as having the memory. My guess is that in general, it'll tend to be more helpful on systems running lots of programs than on systems running one large game (though a leak might change that up), but hard to say without actual testing.
If a flash storage device is really heavily used, I imagine that it'll probably eat through its lifetime write cycles relatively quickly, but if nothing else lives on the device, no biggie if it fails (well, not in terms of data loss for stored stuff), and I don't expect it being 5 or 10 years until DRAM prices come back down, so it doesn't need to last forever.
Probably be interesting to see some gaming sites benchmark some of these approaches.
Playing it on a lean linux distro (or simply neutering Windows heavily) helps a ton. There's tons of Windows stuff that just sits in the background for no reason.
There are also texture optimizers for Skyrim, and some other performance mods.
Honestly, I kinda wish that Bethesda would do a new release of Skyrim that aims at playing well with massive mod sets. Like, slash load time for huge mod counts via defaulting to lazy-loading a lot more stuff. Help avoid or resolve mod conflicts. Let the game intelligently deal with texture resolutions; have mods just provide a single high-resolution image and let the game and scale down and apply GPU texture compression appropriate to a given system, rather than having the developers do tweaking at creation time. Improve multicore support (Starfield has already done that, so they've already done the technical work).
Funny enough, I'm actually running bazzite. That's why i know there's a memory issue instead of windows dicking around lol