why does a program/game slow down or cap out on resource allocation well before the computer is out of resources?
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There are a couple possible reasons, which basically break down into “Because the OS wants to keep some resources in reserve” and “Because the program is hitting a roadblock somewhere else”.
1. The computer is limiting the program from consuming too many resources, so it doesn’t eat resources that other programs need, including potentially the operating system. This stops rogue code in, say, Spotify, from crashing your computer or causing you to get frustrated at other programs responding slowly. This may sound silly, but keep in mind that if a game were to take all the resources, you wouldn’t be able to alt-tab or close the game or run a VOIP program in the background.
2. The program needs a lot of one resource, but not very much of another. A game might need 8GB of memory and 50% of your CPU capacity, but 100% of your GPU capacity. You might only have 7 GB of memory available, so it’ll run at 80% GPU capacity because it’s not actually waiting on the GPU, it’s just trying to get things in and out of memory. This may occur at a granular level you can’t see very well; maybe your CPU has 16 cores but a game can only use 2. That’s 1/8th total CPU utilization, but the game is using 100% of what it can.
Fun fact: If you go to task manager on any windows version, and go to details (or to the processes tab on older versions), and right click on a process, you can manually set the priority of the program to higher or lower. In the olden times (like 15 years ago), if a game was running badly, you’d go in there and set it to realtime so that it would prioritize the game over anything else.
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