VMware Fusion memory leak while gaming (Age of Mythology)

[IndyAnnaJo]

Hi, 

I have a Mac running 12.6 Monterey. I recently installed Vmware Fusion running 13.0 with the standard included Windows 11 and want to play the old game Age of Mythology. Everytime I play for a certain amount of minutes (around 30) my game crashes and says I have over 499999 memory used up. It is a really old game and I doubt it really takes up all the memory I allocated to it. I tried giving it 4 cores and 6000 MB RAM yet I still get this problem. 

After googling it seems to be a memory leak issue, anyone have any suggestions? In a previous post I saw that you can turn off Harddisk buffering which I did. But I still get this issue. 

Thanks!

[Technogeezer]

What Mac are you using? Intel or Apple Silicon?

You say your game crashes. Is that a Windows crash or a Fusion crash?

Where are you seeing the "499999 memory used up". 

Used memory isn't a problem unless you are driving the system into excessive paging, which is noted in the Mac's Activity Monitor memory pressure stat going into the red. 

It is a possibility you have encountered a VMware 3D driver bug. Have you tried turning off 3D acceleration?

(by the way, Windows 11 isn't "included" in anything, you had to install it in a VM from ISO).

[IndyAnnaJo]

What Mac are you using? Apple Sillicon M2 chip

You say your game crashes. Is that a Windows crash or a Fusion crash? No it is the game itself that crashes. Fusion and Windows keep running, the game itself crashes. 

Where are you seeing the "499999 memory used up"? It is a pop-up after the game crashes

The reason I don't suspect it being the game is because my friend is playing the exact game next to me on a Microsoft laptop running Windows. 

It is a possibility you have encountered a VMware 3D driver bug. Have you tried turning off 3D acceleration? Thank you I will try this tip.

(by the way, Windows 11 isn't "included" in anything, you had to install it in a VM from ISO). -> I worded it awkwardly, With VMware Fusion you don't have to download the ISO seperately, you can simply select it when opening a VM. 

[Technogeezer]

Is your friend running a Windows 11 ARM PC? If it's an Intel PC, that's not the same Windows or hardware so it's kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison. You'd have to see if the game runs on a ARM PC like the Microsoft Surface (non-Intel versions) to make a valid comparison.

Without analyzing the crash report (not something that you should expect here as we're users just like you - the game developer or VMware engineers would have to look at it) there are a couple of possibilities here:

The game is probably native Intel code and not compiled for ARM CPUs. It's most likely running under the Microsoft x86_64 translator (similar to Rosetta) that's part of Windows 11 ARM.  You can't rule out a problem with either the translator or a bug with the game running under the translator. You might want to ping the game developer to see if they can give you any guidance.. 

The graphics capabilities are totally different. The VM is running with the VMware SVGA 3D driver which does not implement DirectX 12 or OpenGL. It's possible that you've encountered a problem with the VMware SVGA 3D. Or it's possible that the game has problems with the DirectX 11 features that VMware is providing in their driver.

You might get the attention of a VMware developer if you post more details about the game that's exhibiting the problem. Just note that there are no guarantees on whether they'll see it or take action on it, as VMware folks monitor these forums on their own time and not as part of any official support duties. 

[ColoradoMarmot]

Couple of other thoughts:

It sounds like it's a bug/issue inside the guest, and as Technogeezer notes, it could be simply related to ARM vs Intel rather than Fusion.  But from what you describe it's the game itself, not the guest or host running out of memory (or thinking it has).

One other remote possibility, depending on how old the game is, is that it's a windows 11 compatibility issue, or, and I saw this once, there's actually too much memory available and the game can't handle it because of the variable size in the program.  In that case you can try reducing the memory to the guest, but with win 11 you may not be able to go small enough.  Good rule of thumb is to look for what was standard at the time it came out (I'm guessing no more than 2 or 4 GB).