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Temporarily Disabling DWM to reduce VRAM usage in Windows 10?

g67575

g67575

g67575

Soldato
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30 Jun 2019
Posts
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I noticed that DWM can consume 200-400MB of VRAM in Windows 10.

There are some games that would probably benefit from a few hundred MB of extra VRAM (to avoid stuttering or freezing problems). So, is it possible to temporarily disable the DWM process in Windows 10, to leave this VRAM clear for use in games?
 
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It's too bad that any attempt to completely disable DWM.exe will make Windows 10 unbootable (I had to use a system restore point to boot Windows 10 again). It's no longer an optional part of Windows, like with Windows 7 and Vista. There used to be an option to disable it while running games in Windows 7.

I noticed when running Watch Dogs: Legions that DWM.exe can use upto 500-600 MB of VRAM.

DWM is apparently also responsible for enforcing Vsync in windowed / borderless windowed games...
 
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you can't disable dwm
but you can reset it to release some of its vram
the windows itself is the reason why i hate 3070 and its pony vram. it causes huge %1 lows when the vram is full (and its already full in recent games such as cyberpunk, re village, metro exodus and stuff. i can't imagine how hard nextgen games will hit both the 3070 and the 3080)
couple suggestions for "nextgen" 3070 vram experience
- disable all kinds of hardware accerelation stuff. you have to rely on your cpu on this task. my 2700x can handle it. 10700f should destroy it
900 mb of vram gone in smoke with a couple hardware accerelated programs...

doQr5TY.jpg

after disabling hw accel on these software;

u0hEeYM.jpg

benefits = much higher %1 lows, smoother gameplay overall across many games

here are some couple tricks for extreme measures (cyberpunk at 4k with dlss performance)

taskkill /im explorer.exe /f
taskkill /im dwm.exe /f
taskkill /im ApplicationFrameHost.exe /f
taskkill /im ShellExperienceHost.exe /f
taskkill /im TextInputHost.exe /f
taskkill /im SearchApp.exe /f
taskkill /im dwm.exe /f


copy and paste these into a notepad, and rename it as .bat

running this will kill explorer.exe and reset dwm.exe ;

YyvdyAO.png

you will lose the explorer and the taskbar though. so do this only when you're desperate for vram (which we will be, in couple more years)

this tactic also culls down dwm.exe's vram usage. it does not bloat the way it bloats normally.

with these extreme tactics, i can run cyberpunk dlss 4k + performance without hitches for a while. but after dwm.exe creeps up again, you have to reset it. killing it is enough to reset it (it will restart)

taskkill /im dwm.exe /f

this code alone should do the trick

you can assign macros to your keyboard to run a shortcut of a .bat file killing the dwm.exe and kill it occasionally (every 20 30 minutes or so)

---

extra thought;

w11 will hit the VRAM even harder, most likely. :D
 
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Hi, I found out that you can suspend 'winlogin' from the resource manager, then close dwm completely, but it didn't solve my vram issue with the rtx 3070 in WD: Legion.
 
Success in Watch Dogs : Legion I think!

I completely disabled DWM.exe after starting the game, with 'texture resolution' set to 'High'. In game, I saw VRAM usage rise to 7900-8000 MB of VRAM. I ran the game in windowed mode (I think fullscreen caused problems with DWM not running).

More interestingly, the 'Shared GPU Memory' rose to ~600MB, this basically means the game exe was using 600MB of RAM as a substitute for VRAM, with no freezing in game

I then set texture resolution to 'Ultra', and again there was no freezing in game (tested for 40 minutes in total, driving around on a fast bike).. I couldn't monitor VRAM / shared GPU usage because task manager bugged out at this point.

I need to do some more testing to see if it's another setting in game causing these VRAM issues. But, it looks like the game using 'shared GPU memory' (or not) could be the problem.
 
how? can you please share your methods with us?

shared gpu mem problem is real, you can use capframex tool to monitor it in-game

when a game starts to use ram as vram, performance tanks. not necessarily when it does at 600 mb. the more it uses, the more the performance tanks

performance will be usually fine up to 700-800 mb. things start to get tough once it reaches 1 gb and beyond. you can observe the same effect on the video below. up to 700-800 mb, it seems okay, but after that.. it goes downhill



the tool i used;

https://www.capframex.com/

the overlay parameters you're looking for will be "gpu memory shared game" and "gpu memory dedicated game".

its not an issue on wd:legion, every game will use some amounts of shared memory.

problems start when game actively starts to swap data from ram for gpu operations. then the performance tanks. so there's a fineline between using memory to offload some vram load and using memory to do the vram's task... one can "alleviate" minor issues but other...
 
To turn off DWM.exe while playing, I did this:
1. Ran the game, set it to run in 'Windowed mode'
2. Suspended Winlogin.exe in Resource monitor (so that DWM.exe doesn't restart itself)
3. Ran a bat file with these commands:
taskkill /im explorer.exe /f
taskkill /im ApplicationFrameHost.exe /f
taskkill /im ShellExperienceHost.exe /f
taskkill /im TextInputHost.exe /f
taskkill /im SearchApp.exe /f
taskkill /im dwm.exe /f
Taskmgr.exe

I monitored dedicated and shared GPU memory in task manager during gameplay.

I suspect that the problem is that WD: Legions is not using enough 'Shared GPU Memory', once the VRAM is at capacity / near to the limit, leading the game to freeze (for 30 seconds or more) while the VRAM amount is adjusted.

I will test this on 'Ultra Texture Resolution' at 4K now, with DWP.exe + everything running as normal.
 
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I just got a freeze followed by a game crash with DWM.EXE enabled + ultra texture resolution on. VRAM usage was 7.5GB, with 600-700MB of 'shared GPU memory'.
 
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Why not just change the textures to high instead of ultra?
Outside of side by side analysis with a magnifying glass no one can tell the difference anyway.

May as well go back to dos and booting with modified config.sys file for extra ram... how little things have moved on in 25+ years
 
Unfortunately, I've been getting freezes in gameplay on High settings too, which seems to be common with graphics cards with 8GB VRAM for this game.

Maybe I'll just leave it on high (and see if it keeps freezing repeatedly in one session), as I keep getting game crashes when it's set to Ultra texture resolution.
 
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I'm pretty sure the problems I've been having are related to the page file. Watch Dogs Legion seems to use it a massive amount, particularly after the game freezes. I noticed that the freezing intervals were shorter after I moved the page file to the same drive where the game is installed.

These problems only seem to occur when lots of VRAM is being utilized (on High / Ultra textures).

There were similar problems with Watch Dogs 2 apparently, according to this:
https://forums.ubisoft.com/showthread.php/882136-Freezes-for-seconds-at-a-time-Forums

I think as the game assets load during gameplay, if VRAM is at capacity, it loads graphics data into the pagefile, and then to 'Shared GPU Memory' (in other words RAM). While the data is transferred from the slow page file (on your disk), to the much faster RAM, the game freezes.
 
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