Michael I think per-process memory would be the most appropriate to look at, that one is definitely the amount of memory your process is using.

System memory reporting in macOS is a little complicated at times (there is cache and compressed memory included), I'm not too sure how to interpret it as well. It is not too surprisingly that it changes differently from process memory.

sure. my app uses 20-25GB memory according to activity monitor. In the app itself, it says im using 4GB "vram". so the 20-25GB in activity includes 4GB of "vram" then? some people from apple said vram is allocated different then what's shown in activity monitor, but I don't think that is true, because its unified now.Timothy Liu

oh! it changes differently bc some of it or all of it is compressed. app says 4GB. process memory says 1GB or so. so I just need more memory so as not to compress vram. vram should never be compromised as needs maximum speed.Michael