You Can Now Limit the Amount of RAM Consumed by Microsoft Edge While Gaming
Microsoft Edge continues to position itself as a smart, productivity-focused alternative to Chrome, free of the bloat that Google’s constant feature expansion can sometimes lead to. Now, it seems the company is also going after other browsers like Opera GX , as it has just copied one of that browser’s most useful features.
As reported by Windows Latest , Edge recently added a new resource management feature that allows you to strictly limit the amount of RAM the browser can use. This can be useful while gaming (or performing other resource-intensive tasks), and you can even set the RAM to be limited to only while gaming. You can also give the browser access to just 1GB of memory, so you can be particularly stingy here, but note that this will limit you to about five active tabs when browsing modern websites. Pages may also take longer to load, especially if they contain elements such as videos.
However, it might be worth it if you’re really strapped for RAM when running Edge in the background. Let’s say you have 16GB of RAM and you’re playing a game. You can then limit Edge’s usage to around 4GB of RAM, which should be enough to allow you to quickly check email or walkthroughs without sacrificing gaming performance.
While Resource Controls was previously in beta , Microsoft appears to be rolling it out to the stable build of Edge for Windows now, so everyone should have access to it now (or soon). To find it, first update your browser to the latest version (under Settings > About Microsoft Edge ), then click the three-dot menu in the top right corner and navigate to System and Performance using the sidebar that pops up.
Here, scroll down to the Performance Management section and enable Resource Management .
You will see a RAM slider that ranges from 1 GB to the amount of memory installed on your computer. Select the desired amount. Edge will warn you if your choices will slow down your browser, but that won’t stop you.
Finally, choose whether you want to limit RAM only when gaming on your PC or always. For convenience, I prefer the first one – I don’t need restrictions when I’m out of the game.