Pending RADV Driver Change Leads To Much Lower System RAM Use For Some Games

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Pending RADV Driver Change Leads To Much Lower System RAM Use For Some Games

A pending change to the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is leading to much lower system RAM use for some games that make use of many Vulkan Graphics Pipeline Libraries (GPL). The game causing this issue to be investigated was Valve's Dota 2 on RADV and is now seeing an 85% reduction in system RAM use by this open-source Radeon Linux driver...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/RADV-sRAM-GPL-Optimization

[Sethox]

I remember a few years back people complained that their desktop environment is memory heavy, around 4 GB. This change makes Dota 2 look like a dream for those people, from 3GB to 400 MiB, damn.

In any case, yeah saw Mike Blumenkrantz's blog earlier today, always a nice treat. Thanks to all involved, this really makes me feel like Linux community is heading in the right direction by making things efficiently little by little.

[MastaG]

This will be nice for the Steam Deck

[mbriar]

This will be nice for the Steam Deck

Keep in mind that the only games affected by this are those that use GPL *and* link time optimization, which in practice means it's basically Dota 2 and zink.

[Mangix]

some people run Dota 2 on their deck.

[Tomin]

I remember a few years back people complained that their desktop environment is memory heavy, around 4 GB. This change makes Dota 2 look like a dream for those people, from 3GB to 400 MiB, damn.

To be fair the measured memory consumption wasn't the game itself but a replay of the Vulkan calls that the game makes. Still, it's a very good improvement.

[caligula]

I remember a few years back people complained that their desktop environment is memory heavy, around 4 GB. This change makes Dota 2 look like a dream for those people, from 3GB to 400 MiB, damn,

DDR 4/5 is cheap. DDR 4 is something like 1,85 USD / gigabyte (used memory modules even cheaper, but setting up XMP settings with different kits might not work). You can easily afford 64 to 128 gigabytes these days.

[Paradigm Shifter]

DDR 4/5 is cheap. DDR 4 is something like 1,85 USD / gigabyte (used memory modules even cheaper, but setting up XMP settings with different kits might not work). You can easily afford 64 to 128 gigabytes these days.

This is going to sound strange coming from someone who regularly complains consumer motherboards don't support enough memory, and who currently doesn't have a system with less than 64GB of memory...

...but not everyone can afford that.

And even though I, and many others can afford that, we shouldn't have to and do not necessarily want to.

It's pretty amazing that much of a reduction. If it could be applied elsewhere that would be great.

[Lysius]

How large is the performance impact from this change? I would take this little increase in RAM usage for more or more consistent FPS.

[skeevy420]

This is going to sound strange coming from someone who regularly complains consumer motherboards don't support enough memory, and who currently doesn't have a system with less than 64GB of memory...

...but not everyone can afford that.

And even though I, and many others can afford that, we shouldn't have to and do not necessarily want to.

It's pretty amazing that much of a reduction. If it could be applied elsewhere that would be great.

What sucks, though, is that it isn't necessarily a matter of "want to" as much as it is "have to" these days. Practically anything designed with the PS5 in mind can use nearly every bit of ram a system has because devs get around PCs not having NVMEs and/or DirectStorage by copying the game (or as much as they can) to a ram disk. Playing Hogwarts Legacy, out of 32GB of ram, my system uses 28-29GB for Hogwarts and the rest is for the OS...that's both CachyOS off the Zraid and Windows 11 off the NVMe.

Because of the above, how 32GB is looking to becoming low-end gaming grade, I hope more games support/use both LTO and GPL. I only hope these lazy ramdisk devs aren't too lazy to tweak compiler flags.