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

[stiiixy]

Price point of RAM is irrelevant.

99% (made up percentile) of NON-TECH people don't need more than a Web pages of RAM.

Do the sums. It's ALL they're doing; one task, and that's pretty much all web-driven now (I'm a binary boy...it irks me this webpoop)

Don't assume for a second what you're doing is what they're doing, as painful as it is to watch.

I've had to drive incredibly underspecced Atom J's on a very heavy turnover role, wondering how they function. 8GB was NOT an option on these consoles.

[Weasel]

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.

You gotta be trolling with this one. If it was that cheap I wouldn't be hard pressed to find them, cheap or not (they're not even cheap, 128 GB probably cost as much as a mid CPU).

[erniv2]

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.

The change in Ram usage over a year is sick my PC is not even a year old i build it with a 16GB kit last April everywhere i read it said ah 16GB is fine for Games, in October i bought a 2nd 16GB kit and upgraded to 32GB, and last weekend i played Diablo4 beta and was like oh why is this stuttering and taskmanager said too bad 28+ from the 32GB is used and the vram is fully used aswell at 1080p.

So yea if you build a new system now 64GB is the way to go crasy change in one year.

[blackshard]

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.

IMHO the fact that RAM modules are cheap does not mean it worth nothing to optimize either memory usage/cpu usage/whatever because you can add "moarrrr hardweeer!"

There are many reasons that going from 3gb to 400mb (one order of magnitude!) is indeed a very good achievement in general. Things that come up in my mind right now:

• more cache hit/less cache pollution (ie: more performance)
• less traffic on the memory bus (ie: less power consumption, more performance)
• more chances it will run on current or future constrained/low power hardware (raspberry pi, or any other single board computer out there)

[caligula]

If it was that cheap I wouldn't be hard pressed to find them, cheap or not (they're not even cheap, 128 GB probably cost as much as a mid CPU).

Memory is expensive if you need to find two large modules, but for desktop systems with 4 slots it's easy. For example

G.Skill RipJaws V DIMM Kit 128GB (4 x 32 GB), DDR4-2666, CL18-18-18-43, $280
GIGABYTE A520M DS3H AM4 | $86
AMD Ryzen 5 5600G, 6C/12T, 3.90-4.40GHz, boxed, AM4 | $135
Kingston NV2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD 1TB, M.2 | $43
Recycle some old case & PSU - the system's total TDP is less than 100W.

In total, ~$550

[caligula]

IMHO the fact that RAM modules are cheap does not mean it worth nothing to optimize either memory usage/cpu usage/whatever because you can add "moarrrr hardweeer!"

I just think normal developers easily earn $100 per hour. So, the upgrade from 64 to 128 GB costs around $150 more. 1,5 hours of work. How much is your time worth? First, try the easy solution. When you have 128 gigs of RAM, it becomes easy to optimize the code. Look how easily they fixed the kernel build process when the low-end systems with 32 gigs started to run out of memory.

[nranger]

... last weekend i played Diablo4 beta and was like oh why is this stuttering and taskmanager said too bad 28+ from the 32GB is used and the vram is fully used aswell at 1080p.

That anecdote in no way proof that 64GB of system ram is needed. The game and the OS will cache as much as possible using the ram you DO have, so 28 out of 32 GB used is almost meaningless. The maxed out vram (not sure how much you have) is a more likely culprit, but not a guarantee because the behavior is the same - the game will allocate it all even if it's not being actively used.

I'd bet the stuttering you experienced is a result of (a) it's a beta, (b) poor shader compilation/caching behavior, (c) sub-optimal vram usage.

[erniv2]

That anecdote in no way proof that 64GB of system ram is needed. The game and the OS will cache as much as possible using the ram you DO have, so 28 out of 32 GB used is almost meaningless. The maxed out vram (not sure how much you have) is a more likely culprit, but not a guarantee because the behavior is the same - the game will allocate it all even if it's not being actively used.

I'd bet the stuttering you experienced is a result of (a) it's a beta, (b) poor shader compilation/caching behavior, (c) sub-optimal vram usage.

If the taskmanager says 28.2GB used 5.5GB compressed it´s allready well over 32GB it´s allready useing the zram and swaping to the nvme and the cache is on top of that 3.7GB is used for caching/system 28.2 to 31.9 leaves 3.7.

But it´s true that useing a beta version is not representive they can probably fix some memory leaks till release, but it´s a exemple of how new software hogs ram like crasy.

[Spacefish]

Worst offender i have seen regarding RAM usage while running on Linux: "DETROIT: Become Human".. It uses ~40GB on my PC and starts to swap / becomes unplayable if i have less than 48GB System RAM.

[Linuxxx]

Worst offender i have seen regarding RAM usage while running on Linux: "DETROIT: Become Human".. It uses ~40GB on my PC and starts to swap / becomes unplayable if i have less than 48GB System RAM.

That sounds like a mis-configured Linux setup then.

Let me guess:

THP (Transparent HugePages) set to "always", right?

I'm saying that because I've recently played through that same game with only 16GB of RAM, and the experience was flawless.

Also, if you take a look over at ProtonDB, then you can see quite a few reports of people saying the game ran acceptably even on the Steam Deck, which has to share it's 16GB of RAM with the iGPU, too.
In fact, the game has a Steam Deck verified label by Valve themselves.

All of the above evidence points towards a severe flaw in your Linux system.

Might be worth investigating further on your end...