Even though Destiny 2 seems to have just received its best expansion in quite a long time now, many players have some trouble enjoying the game due to a number of performance problems. Some of these include a generally lower frame rate with each new content drop, slow user interface, and character and weapon models not loading in properly.
Various intermittent performance problems have been a mainstay in the PC version of Destiny 2 for some time now, with Bungie seemingly unable to keep the game in top condition as of late. The game's community, however, may have now accidentally discovered the potential cause of at least some of these issues.
According to Reddit user BrandoGil, and further corroborated by a number of other community members, Destiny 2 is currently suffering from a relatively severe memory leak. BrandoGil claims to have noticed strange stutters while playing Destiny 2​​​​​​​ at an otherwise stable 120 FPS gaming experience and went to check out their PC's resource usage via the Task Manager. They saw that Destiny 2 was using 6 GB of RAM just by hanging out in the game's player hub, the Tower.
As other users have pointed out, this memory leak seems like it may extend to VRAM usage, too, which is an even more serious problem than a regular RAM leak. Namely, VRAM refers to a graphics card's own memory, which, in most cases, caps out at up to 10 GB. Final Fantasy 7 was experiencing VRAM leaks as well not long ago, which leads to excessive stuttering the longer the game runs.
This wouldn't be the first time that the community has discovered issues with the game's technical side of things. Late last year, for example, players figured out that Destiny 2's enemy damage output depends on FPS, meaning that the higher the frame rate, the more damage would players take. Note that this problem is yet to be resolved and that locking the game at anything other than 60 FPS puts you at a relative disadvantage compared to 60 FPS players.
While simply restarting the game every so often might sound like an obvious solution at face value, it's worth remembering that the Witch Queen pyramid raid race is kicking off this weekend, on March 5th. Since players need to figure out what to do in a new raid, it can easily take hours' worth of playtime until it gets completed the first time. RAM and VRAM leaks could, therefore, cause a lot of issues for the community this time around.
Destiny 2 is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.