I was playing Elemental recently on a couple systems. The first was my desktop PC: 4gb ram, fairly low expectations for not OOM crashing. Like I had expected, it crashed after about 2 hours on a large map. However, I then went to a PC at my college's Game Development Lab. These PCs are pretty much top of the line: 6gb of RAM with an Nvidia 480gtx GPU and an 8 core i7 930 chip to top it all off.

Curious as to Elemental's memory usage, I kept task manager up on the other monitor while playing Elemental. What I saw was somewhat perplexing. The memory usage, while it did creep up by about 400 mb over the course of a 2 hour game, did not surpass 2.75gb total usage out of the system's 6. After about 2 hours, it too had an OOM CTD despite the obvious 3.25 free gb of RAM. The system had not run out of memory; not even close. There weren't even any spikes during the course of the game on the memory usage graph.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but even if it were running out of video memory (somewhat unlikely on a video card with 1.5gb of memory), shouldn't it just slow the game down and dump the excess into RAM? Which leads me to wonder: is it really running out of memory, or is this just an incorrect allocation of it at some point in the code?