1. Description
Recently Intel & Microsoft acknowledged a memory leak when playing fullscreen games or using a fullscreen application using a different display resolution and/or refresh rate than your desktop’s display resolution. As shown in the screenshot below, you can see that the ‘pagefile usage’ gradually increases untill you get a dialog saying “Low on memory”, prompting to close your game / 3D application.
To know if you are affected you can use ‘System Explorer’, and monitor the swap file usage. A smaller page file is more likely to trigger the ‘low on memory’ message faster. Do not increase the page file to a very high capacity. It will not help.
In the screenshot below you can see that the bug was triggered while a affected game or 3D application was active in fullscreen with a different display resolution than the desktop was running at in Windows 8.1.
Suddently the pagefile usage decreases, this happens when alt-tabbing out the game or 3D application.
Requirements
These are the hardware requirements and operatings affected by the bug. You must meet one of the hardware configurations mentioned in #1.2 and the operating system(s) mentioned in #1.2.
2.1. Hardware configuration
Nvidia Optimus (with Intel CPU)
Intel HD Graphics
AMD Dynamic Switchable Graphics (with Intel CPU)
2.2. Operating systems
Windows 8.1
3. Solution
- Righ-click the start orb, and open ‘Control Panel’.
- Open ‘Windows Update’ and check for new ‘Windows Updates’.
- If there are no new ‘Windows Updates’, verify that ‘August 2014 update rollup for Windows RT 8.1, Windows 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2 (KB2975719)’ is installed by clicking on ‘View Update History’.
The actual Windows Update or hotfix that fixes this bug is KB2976943.