Mesa 25.0 Gets A New Vulkan Layer For Limiting The Amount Of Reported vRAM

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 26 January 2025 at 06:49 AM EST. 5 Comments
MESA
A half-year-old merge request from Igalia's Karmjit Mahil has been merged for Mesa 25.0 that is a Vulkan layer allowing for optionally limiting the amount of video memory reported to games/applications.

Primarily for testing/debugging purposes, the new "vram-report-limit" Vulkan layer allows for limiting the amount of video memory reported to an application. It doesn't enforce actual limits on the vRAM use but rather just the expressed amount of vRAM reported to be available. From there applications may alter their behavior based on seeing less vRAM than is actually there, but if they keep on allocating memory they can still go above the artificially limited cap.

Vulkan vRAM limit MR


Karmjit Mahil worked on this Vulkan layer for wanting to explore reductions in the vRAM limit and their impact on gaming performance. The layer allows via VK_VRAM_REPORT_LIMIT_HEAP_SIZE specifying a static size in MiB for all device heaps for a given Vulkan physical device.

Those interested in this Vulkan layer within Mesa 25.0 for debugging/testing purposes can find all the details within this merge request.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week