Played the game for a few hours. Version is 1.11 with hearts of stone and all dlc. Have 16gb ram and looked at task manager and the game was eating over 15gb of RAM. I am guessing this is in no way normal. Any help would be good...

What are your hardware details?

Not great but
AMD A10 5800k 4ghz
16gb ddr3 1600 ram
Radeon HD 7970
Samsung SSD 850 evo
Catalyst 15.11.1

Are you sure it's the game that grabbing all that RAM? Have you checked the Task Manager / Resource Monitor to pinpoint which process is using the memory? It could be some background task.

yes it is witcher3.exe that is eating ram. the more i play the bigger it gets. just now only played 45 mins and it started with 3 gb and ended with over 10

A friend had a similar problem after upgrading to Windows 10. One of the drivers did not work properly after the upgrade, resulting in a memory leak. His RAM-usage would keep going until there was no more available RAM, and the PC bluescreened. Reinstalling the driver solved it. Have you upgraded your operating system recently?

dont have windows 10. Still use 7 ultimate 64

Alright. Are you on Catalyst beta-drivers? I believe there was a memory leak problem in one of the beta-drivers released a few months ago, but it got fixed shortly after.

EDIT: Nevermind, I see you have the Catalyst 11.1 beta-driver. I don't know if memory leak is a known issue with that driver.

Yes version 15.11.1 but they said it was fixed

now using crimson drivers. still extreme memory usage

no no crash but it starts stuttering like crazy and takes over 5 mins to shut down

Hmm...I still think it is a memory leak. Afaik there isn't anything you could do....

Try sending an e-mail to support.

Windows 10 is free for you, you know. On balance I've found it a good deal more backwards compatible with games than Win7. I also went from Win7 to Win8.1 before I went to 10, and I found that even 8/.1 was better than Win7 in terms of game support. From now on Microsoft will be putting 100% of its R&D into Win10. No R&D will go into Win7/8--Win7 will get security patching until early 2020--Windows 8 for longer. But all of the new (and hopefully better stuff) is all going into Win10 from now on. Hopefully you are planning to take advantage of the free upgrade before July/29/2016--because after that the freebie upgrade drops off.

You should be aware that AMD is moving to WDDM 2.0 support for its GPUs--including the 7970 (the entire 7000 series & up, in fact.) Don't know if that's your problem, but WDDM 2.0 is not supported by Windows 7. Neither is d3d12, which is also being developed for.

I don't have the symptoms you describe with w3--game shuts down instantly. But I'm using the Crimson drivers inside the Catalyst CC shell (works great), Win10x64 v1511, AMD FX-8320e, AMD R9 380 4GB. I can't recall ever even having a CTD--game has been rock-solid. running patch 1.11 with the first expansion for the game installed.

I'd suggest reinstalling the game from scratch, and then reinstalling your gpu drivers. You've still got time to go to Win10 but as stable as it is I wouldn't waste time clinging to yesterday...;) Hope you can get it sorted...!