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Update 3/28: An earlier version of this story mistakenly attributed comments to game director Guangyun Chen. The correct speaker is Marvel Rivals lead technical designer Weikang Ruan. The story has been updated to reflect the correction.
Let all the modestly powerful computer owners breathe a sigh of relief. NetEase is aware that Marvel Rivals is currently a massive RAM hog and is working on a fix.
“On PC, we realize that [optimization] is a big problem, especially for the memory consumption,” Marvel Rivals lead technical designer Weikang Ruan told PC Gamer during an interview at GDC 2025. “So it may be that in Season 2, we will have an experimental check box in our launcher players can use to reduce memory [consumption] significantly.”
That check box can’t come any sooner. Rivals’ system requirements are reasonable for a modern game—especially considering it’s running on the notoriously stuttery Unreal Engine 5—but its memory issues can be a real drag. My partner loves Rivals, but a January patch completely tanked her performance until she upgraded from 16GB of RAM to 32.
Rivals has been running great ever since, but the bottleneck suggests its current recommendation of 16GB isn’t entirely accurate. If the goal is to optimize the shooter for the widest range of PC builds, low-RAM options would go a long way. However, it’s not yet clear how this new toggle will affect the experience. Presumably, there will be some give and take—as in, Rivals gives back some RAM, but maybe takes away from its dynamic destruction or some other computationally complex feature.
Ruan says the earliest we could expect the RAM fix is Season 2, which should start in mid-April, but that’s no guarantee.
“It’s a very big problem, but it’s a lot of work to organize [a fix]. We cannot just release it in a small patch, we have to fully test it. But we realize the problem and we’re going to keep optimizing.”
As to what’s causing Rivals’ performance issues more broadly, Ruan cites the growing pains the wider industry is experiencing with the young engine.
“It’s hard for all developers to use the engine and make it good,” he said. “It’s a new engine for us. We have a lot of hard work [ahead] to optimize it.”
