High ram usage while idle on a windows 11 pc

Of the 16GB of video RAM that shipped with your card, 8GB is reserved for graphics processing, and the remaining 8GB is available to your computer for other uses, if needed.

Your computer has no video RAM, which means it's using your graphics card only. Either you have no integrated graphics, which is not typical these days, or your integrated graphics is disabled in the UEFI (which it should be.)

If you are running two monitors, you could use your graphics card to drive one of the monitors, and your integrated graphics to drive the other. This would require additional software to manage.

Other information in the image you supplied:

Your nVidia graphics card has its own BIOS. The BIOS version is 90.6.44.809b. Today's graphics cards are more like small computers.

Your DAC (digital-to-analog converter) is integrated in the card, and the conversion is performed in the card's own memory, which is why it's called a RAMDAC.

And we should see them in Process Manager or Task Manager,

if not, or those tools are useless then ....

Do you have an integrated GPU or a dedicated GPU?

Issue is related to BIOS/UEFI/Windows OS assigning most of the RAM as STATICLY shared VRAM instead of allowing for a dynamic allocation.
Followed then by not properly listing the Shared RAM as VRAM for the IGPU, making it to look like you are missing a chunk of your RAM for no reason.

IF you have a IGPU and a dedicated GPU attempt to A. Turn off the IGPU in BIOS/UEFI or B. Set a maximum (instead of allowing auto,) amount of RAM that can be allocated as "Shared" VRAM.

I fixed it! It's really simple...just buy more RAM! I have 32G now!

I have tried to upload screenshots as evidence for this on both Firefox and Windows Edge, and they keep failing to upload. Until I can figure out that problem too, you'll just have to take my word for things and I'll describe the issue to my best knowledge. Just do your best to imagine pictures, I guess
I've had this same issue for a long time now and have been looking into solutions with no luck for a couple weeks, so I figured I'd throw my hat into the ring here.

I am using an ASUS Vivobook running Windows 11 with 12 GB of RAM. I am currently on version 23H2.

Even with all non-essential and third party software closed (except my antivirus, which I cannot turn off) I use roughly 50% of my RAM. (see below screenshots)

This alone is very concerning, but on top of that I have noticed that when switching between viewing the usage as percents and values the totals don't add up to be nearly as much as I have the capacity for (as shown in screenshots below). The percents don't always add up to 100% so I assumed it just meant the percent of my total RAM, but that doesn't make sense either as you can see that Firefox is using 11.5% RAM and 556.2 MB, which doesn't quite add up. It would imply I'm either only using 4835.6 MB of space, or that that is my total available. Weirdly enough, if you look above at my first screenshots, Windows Explorer is using 107.6 MB or 9.2%, which would actually be roughly 9.2% of my total. This is one of the few times that the percent accurately reflected my total installed RAM.

The below screenshots are of my computer after a fresh restart and after disabling all non-essential startup applications (again, the only third party one is my antivirus because I can't and do not want to turn it off. That's what "Active Monitor Service" is). After a fresh restart, my total usage sticks around 30% which is considerably better, but still bad. This will also eventually go back up to 50% after some regular use, even if I close all background processes possible with task manager.

This is not just an issue while idle, I believe that this is impacting my performance while running other applications. I will notice that even my browser slows down after I've been running my computer for too long, and if I even think about booting up a slightly intensive game then my whole computer freaks out.

To wrap this up, my biggest questions are these:

1. What is causing 30-50% of my RAM to be used because I highly doubt that it's my antivirus and it's clearly not any other third party application
2. Why are the percentages off? Are they supposed to represent the percent of RAM being used or percent of installed RAM?
3. Most importantly, how can I fix this? I have tried a clean restart. I have tried scrubbing away extraneous processes. I have tried turning up and down various settings. I've attempted most of the solutions in this thread and this is where I'm at. Is there even a way to fix this?