How to increase VRAM efficiency?

Seacat17 · 2024-04-07 11:25:23

Okay, I know this question is very silly but I saw something like this happening on some older Windows machines and now I'm curious.

I have 4gb 3050. Right now, if I'll reach the limit and fill it's VRAM, my FPS in ANY game will drop to single digits. But the thing is that before, I saw Windows machines with GTX 950 using main RAM as swap file for VRAM to avoid such performance drops. And even if it's not possible - then it'll just blur the textures before it will get critical.

Is there any way to do such stuff on Linux? How can I use my VRAM more efficiently?

seth · 2024-04-07 16:12:38

I saw Windows machines with GTX 950 using main RAM as swap file for VRAM to avoid such performance drops. And even if it's not possible - then it'll just blur the textures before it will get critical.

"Saw"? How did you "see" the internal procedures of the GPU driver?
Any link that describes that behavior?

If you're running out of VRAM the textures have to be re-read from disk and the disk is cached in your RAM (unless you explicitly disabled that) - on top of that the GPU driver can map RAM into its own address space, though that's more common for IGPs/APUs (and results in "lots of ram used away by apparently nothing" posts )

Using alternative textures/resolutions/compressions is the games job - I'm not aware of any official feature in the driver like that and it typically causes outrage if the GPU driver silently does this to "improve" the game performance (faking better GPU performance by altering the metric. aka "cheating")
If the windows driver provides that as an official global feature, you'd have to ask nvidia to port it but I couldn't find anything like that (as a global setting)

Are you looking for DLDSR & DSR? (upscaling a framebuffer rendered at lower resolution)

jl2 · 2024-04-07 18:22:44

Yes, it's enabled by default:
'cat /sys/class/drm/card*/device/mem_info_gtt_total'

And aren't you sure you have a 6gb card? 3050 only has 8G/6G models.

And as already said, it's only fast for igpus, which either way already live off it.
You're chances are best with a fast connector. Got a free PCIe 4x8 slot?

Last edited by jl2 (2024-04-07 18:23:07)

spiffeeroo · 2024-04-07 18:41:13

A game running with DXVK (including DXVK on Windows) will generally use more VRAM than DirectX on Windows. I do not recall if VKD3D-Proton (DirectX 12) has similar VRAM consumption.

Seacat17 · 2024-04-11 19:45:59

spiffeeroo wrote:

A game running with DXVK (including DXVK on Windows) will generally use more VRAM than DirectX on Windows. I do not recall if VKD3D-Proton (DirectX 12) has similar VRAM consumption.

Now THIS may be the answer here...

Seacat17 · 2024-04-11 19:47:00

jl2 wrote:

Yes, it's enabled by default:
'cat /sys/class/drm/card*/device/mem_info_gtt_total'
And aren't you sure you have a 6gb card? 3050 only has 8G/6G models.
And as already said, it's only fast for igpus, which either way already live off it.
You're chances are best with a fast connector. Got a free PCIe 4x8 slot?

It's laptop. And it's 3050 with 4 gigs of VRAM.

Arch Linux

#1 2024-04-07 11:25:23

How to increase VRAM efficiency?

#2 2024-04-07 16:12:38

Re: How to increase VRAM efficiency?

#3 2024-04-07 18:22:44

Re: How to increase VRAM efficiency?

#4 2024-04-07 18:41:13

Re: How to increase VRAM efficiency?

#5 2024-04-11 19:45:59

Re: How to increase VRAM efficiency?

#6 2024-04-11 19:47:00

Re: How to increase VRAM efficiency?

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