How to manage RAM bloat in Cities Skylines II with DDR5?
In a memory-hog like this city builder, even 32GB feels like a joke once you load a few thousand high-res MODs. RAM usage was pinned at 92% - 96%, causing frame times to swing wildly from 20ms to 150ms, which is just infuriating. I tried lowering the MOD texture resolution, but even at the lowest settings, the memory was still overflowing—a total drop in the bucket. I eventually manually set the virtual memory to 64GB and forced it onto a PCIe 5.0 NVMe partition, then set the game process priority to 'High'. In the performance panel, the swap frequency is still high, but those agonizing second-long freezes are gone. I noticed the system took about 8 seconds longer to boot after the change, but disabling Core Isolation brought it back to normal. RAM temps were 48℃ - 54℃ and the SSD hit 55℃ - 62℃. I exported the swap curves via System Monitor for archiving, with fans steady at 1400 - 1600 RPM.
