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Close this thread please, it's old and tired :)

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g67575

g67575

g67575

Soldato
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I take back what I said, it looks like 8GB VRAM isn't quite enough (by around 400MB VRAM for WD: Legions).

While playing Watch Dogs: Legion, I noticed that exceeding the VRAM budget by playing at 4K (any DLSS setting), Ultra textures (optional texture pack installed) + Ray tracing on medium, causes prolonged freezing in game.

It's very weird when it happens, your character just freezes and nothing happens for ~30 seconds, but the game doesn't crash. Afterwards, gameplay resumes as normal.

I don't mind too much, as I'm sure turning down the texture setting to High will fix the over budget VRAM issue.

There's a tech radar article here that discusses the problem:
https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/n...6gb-vram-runs-watch-dogs-legion-more-smoothly

As a workaround for now, players can reduce the texture resolution setting from Ultra to any other setting, as the difference between low and Ultra is about 4.2GB of VRAM.

Overall though, framerates seem much better on an 8 core CPU and new RAM, can get 50-60FPS on 4K DLSS balanced, solid 60 on DLSS performance.

Guess I'll be upgrading the GPU in 2-3 years if this happens in more than a few games.
 
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Looks like @tommybhoy was right after all, he reported quirks with his 3070 when you get near full utilisation of memory. Saw similar on my 5700 XT too when I had one in a few games.
 
I heard a few people on these forums saying that it didn't matter too much when you exceed the VRAM amount by a bit with Nvidia graphics cards.

What does the Nvidia driver actually do when a game or program exceeds the VRAM capacity?

I wonder if the game is inadvertently using the system's page file instead, 30 seconds does seem like a very long delay if it's using just RAM.
 
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I disabled the Windows pagefile. After restarting my PC, I loaded the game and the game crashed after loading (presumably exceeding the available VRAM amount).
 
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g67575 said:
I tried disabling the Windows pagefile after exceeding the VRAM budget and the game crashes!!
Click to expand...

Disabled the pagefile while the game was active? that will crash stuff anyhow due to the way commit works.

What happens when you exceed the VRAM amount can vary widely depending on what kind of data and how it uses it the application is working with - some stuff can happily stream 100s of MB even if you were paged out to disc other stuff even having to swap out a few single digit MBs of data non-local to the GPU can bring everything to a halt.

Conversely some data will be resident in system RAM if it is being heavily CPU manipulated and will cause all kinds of penalties/issues if you force it into a GPU memory location (though generally more true of older APIs).
 
It only crashes if I exceed the VRAM budget amount shown in the game, just tested it with page file off, if I don't exceed the budget, the game loads normally.

I used to be a game tester, so I'm used to breaking stuff lol.
 
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g67575 said:
I take back what I said, it looks like 8GB VRAM isn't quite enough (by around 400MB VRAM for WD: Legions).

While playing Watch Dogs: Legion, I noticed that exceeding the VRAM budget by playing at 4K (any DLSS setting), Ultra textures (optional texture pack installed) + Ray tracing on medium, causes prolonged freezing in game.

It's very weird when it happens, your character just freezes and nothing happens for ~30 seconds, but the game doesn't crash. Afterwards, gameplay resumes as normal.

I don't mind too much, as I'm sure turning down the texture setting to High will fix the over budget VRAM issue.

There's a tech radar article here that discusses the problem:
https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/n...6gb-vram-runs-watch-dogs-legion-more-smoothly

As a workaround for now, players can reduce the texture resolution setting from Ultra to any other setting, as the difference between low and Ultra is about 4.2GB of VRAM.

Overall though, framerates seem much better on an 8 core CPU and new RAM, can get 50-60FPS on 4K DLSS balanced, solid 60 on DLSS performance.

Guess I'll be upgrading the GPU in 2-3 years if this happens in more than a few games.
Click to expand...
Wow, this IS a surprise...

...said absolutely no-one with any common sense. :p
 
It looks like it crashes if you are quite close to the budget too (7500/8000GB), with page file disabled.

Would it be too optimistic to expect them to patch this :rolleyes:
 
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Disabling pagefile is actually quite good, if you are wondering if your game has vram issues disabled pagefile and see if the game crashes
 
If you're going to report issues about disabling the pagefile, it's helpful if you reveal how much system ram you have and it's utilisation.

Every program crashes if it runs out of free system ram without a pagefile.
 
Photoshop will nag you if no page file even before even you run out of system memory, so a small page file even 2-4GB depending on what programmes you use and SSD's are no longer 60-250GB so on 500GB+ even a 8GB page file is not much to loose.

Just as well it is no longer by default 1.5x your system memory with the likes of 16-64GB of memory used now.

AFAIR Nvidia recommended the system memory to be 2x the Vram in case it has to start grabbing system memory but by then it would be slow and even more if it had to then use the page file on a SSD/HDD.
 
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same here, this gpu will probably fall on itself in 2023-2024 aaa games

i have no problem lowering the textures, as long as they look "okay".

but in rdr 2, when you turn the textures from "ultra" to "high", it becomes practically this;

https://www.reddit.com/r/reddeadred...ed_dead_2_looks_like_playdoh_and_it_stutters/

i will share some interesting findings on Godfall later tomorrow.

i just wish textures on high settings would look good in every game. some games are only playable with ultra textures
 
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For the avoidance of doubt, I have 16gb of RAM installed, so running the game without a page file enabled really shouldn't crash the game, if VRAM capacity is exceeded.

Or, maybe it's a feature ;)
 
Just lower the textures setting, job done. Regardless of whether the game is crashing or not, you don't want to exhausting VRAM anyway as it could lead to stuttering.
 
As far as I'm aware, the GPU system memory isn't mappable to the pagefile. I don't think that's the issue.

Games crashing with the page file disabled sounds like a system running out of available commit to me. That could certainly be possible if the GPU starts using system memory as that reduces available commit for applications and could push an OOM situation.

On my own box I regularly see 15-20 GB used commit just sitting on the desktop with chrome and discord open. With such an amount, even 32 GB RAM with no pagefile would be very likely to crash while gaming.
 
g67575 said:
I take back what I said, it looks like 8GB VRAM isn't quite enough (by around 400MB VRAM for WD: Legions).

While playing Watch Dogs: Legion, I noticed that exceeding the VRAM budget by playing at 4K (any DLSS setting), Ultra textures (optional texture pack installed) + Ray tracing on medium, causes prolonged freezing in game.

It's very weird when it happens, your character just freezes and nothing happens for ~30 seconds, but the game doesn't crash. Afterwards, gameplay resumes as normal.

I don't mind too much, as I'm sure turning down the texture setting to High will fix the over budget VRAM issue.

There's a tech radar article here that discusses the problem:
https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/n...6gb-vram-runs-watch-dogs-legion-more-smoothly

As a workaround for now, players can reduce the texture resolution setting from Ultra to any other setting, as the difference between low and Ultra is about 4.2GB of VRAM.

Overall though, framerates seem much better on an 8 core CPU and new RAM, can get 50-60FPS on 4K DLSS balanced, solid 60 on DLSS performance.

Guess I'll be upgrading the GPU in 2-3 years if this happens in more than a few games.
Click to expand...

Exactly same issues (same freezing for over 10 seconds now and then) I had in Borderlands 3 on 2070S (8GB vRAM) - after about 20 minutes of playing. It started fine, then the longer I played the worse it got. No such issues on 6800 as much more vRAM to play around. And BL3 doesn't have DLSS nor RT and I played it in 1440p to that - still caused issues.

Problem with people testing vRAM use in games is that they load a map, look around for a minute and say "Not a problem, works great, 8GB still enough!". But it often happens after a bit longer session of at least said 20 minutes, when game loads more assets and textures and starts chocking. I had FPS drops in few other games but freezes only in BL3, on that 8GB card.
That said, textures are the easiest and one of the best options to increase fidelity in game - it doesn't lower FPS as long as one has enough vRAM, hence can be increased in new games even on older cards, unlike RT or similar. However, with just 8GB vRAM it'll be the opposite soon enough - one will have to lower them to keep up proper FPS. :/
 
DarkBahamut said:
As far as I'm aware, the GPU system memory isn't mappable to the pagefile. I don't think that's the issue.

Games crashing with the page file disabled sounds like a system running out of available commit to me. That could certainly be possible if the GPU starts using system memory as that reduces available commit for applications and could push an OOM situation.

On my own box I regularly see 15-20 GB used commit just sitting on the desktop with chrome and discord open. With such an amount, even 32 GB RAM with no pagefile would be very likely to crash while gaming.
Click to expand...

Same on my box with 32GB of RAM - it's plenty but commit still spikes to high numbers. Worth remembering is that with Windows 10 managing memory much much better than WindowsXP did, it makes 0 sense turning off pagefile. It's just best to leave it on Auto size, as Win10 will use it only when it really must and will keep size of it as low as possible too. Some people seem to be still throwing around "hacks" from WinXP times, which simply do not apply anymore.
 
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