Hi,

Am I reading this wrong? is 1.7GB used for BMP? is this sprites and textures?

Yes, that seems to be for textures. Better do something about it, at least use a compressed format before releasing that game.

That's weird, all my wads combined only take up 170mb the textures are all compressed (.dds) format. Maybe it gets uncompressed when the game is loaded?

that's strange because the great advantage when using .dds is that - even with compression - the file is already in the format that direct-x uses which means theres no need to convert it.

so, if you use .dds textures the file size on the (v)ram should be exactly the same as on your hard drive.

Perhaps you used the wrong DDS compression format for your textures? Or maybe it's just a really big map!

dds does not get uncompressed. So your compressed textures must be already this big.

Disabling pre-load (changing preload_mode from 3+4 to 1) seems to have dropped the memory usage significantly, but now the game is extremely unstable. For example driving in a car down the road where traffic lights, trees and pedestrians need to load causes the engine to crash.

Your map is just to big. The memory in task manager also counts mesh data. For a map like this (big city) you need A LOT of LoD for every single object. This will save much mesh memory.