If your GPU has 8GB VRAM or less, and you want RT ON, read this.

[Umie]

You HAVE TO set your textures to medium. If the game exceeds 8GB at any point, you will or MAY experience a terrible menu/UI slowdown bug, which gradually tanks your FPS whenever you access the inventory/map, and you'll need to restart the game every 30-60mins. This has been an issue with RT since CP's release, and this is the only fix to this problem. With that in mind, my game looks and runs better with 2.0 on my 3070 than before. But I don't think NVidia has any interest in fixing this problem (it's a bug with RT itself, not CP). Hopefully this helps the 3060/3070 owners.

EDIT: I forgot to mention this discussion is only for 1440p. This bug shouldn't be a thing at 1080p, or with 4-series GPUs.

[Morphogenetic]

Can confirm this is the single most important setting. Doing this makes it possible to have ray traced shadows on my 2060 at 60fps and everything else on high. (Except for Dogtown atm, but that is confirmed a memory leak)

[TimmyP]

I don't get any of this except the usual "Tensor core slowdown" after changing a DLSS quality setting, or turning DLSS\RT off then on. This bug is in Doom Eternal and Witcher 3 also.

I can actually max pt on my 3070 with 1440p DLSSp. 45+ fps all of the time with reflex and VRR is smooth enough for me, its 50+ fps 90 percent of the time. If I change a DLSS setting, or RT (something that would affect the tensor cores), the game slows to 30+fps until I restart. Witcher 3 maxed does the same thing from 65+ fps to 40+ fps at all times, highest possible settings.

Can verify it has nothing to do with entering\exiting the menu, only changing these graphical options. Played for hours with no problem, maxed, zero stutter or hiccups period (this game is incredibly optimized). 1440p/DLSSp.

5800x3d 3070 32gb

[Umie]

Originally posted by TimmyP:

I don't get any of this except the usual "Tensor core slowdown" after changing a DLSS quality setting, or turning DLSS\RT off then on. This bug is in Doom Eternal and Witcher 3 also.

interesting. not sure if I'm talking about the same thing. for me, I've always been plagued by a gradual and horrible FPS drop during my gaming sessions with RT turned on, brought on by the usage of the inventory/map/other UI elements. only recently I discovered VRAM was exceeding 8GB, and someone on Reddit suggested I decrease textures to medium. This way my VRAM no longer exceeds 7800MB, and the FPS drops are gone for good. it's the ONLY thing that helped in this situation.

And yeah I can confirm I'm getting about the same FPS on those settings as you on my 3070.

[Alceme]

Originally posted by Umie:

You HAVE TO set your textures to medium. If the game exceeds 8GB at any point, you will or MAY experience a terrible menu/UI slowdown bug, which gradually tanks your FPS whenever you access the inventory/map, and you'll need to restart the game every 30-60mins. This has been an issue with RT since CP's release, and this is the only fix to this problem. With that in mind, my game looks and runs better with 2.0 on my 3070 than before. But I don't think NVidia has any interest in fixing this problem (it's a bug with RT itself, not CP). Hopefully this helps the 3060/3070 owners.

i have a 4080 with 16 gb vram and i am getting this issue though lol

[Umie]

Originally posted by Alceme:

i have a 4080 with 16 gb vram and i am getting this issue though lol

is it possible you're pushing your VRAM past what the card can handle? like 4k with RT maxed out for example?

[Alceme]

nope 2k 2560x1440 here

[Alceme]

also paired with 32gb of ram and 13900k cpu

[Alceme]

i even check vram usage during a session and it never hit 11gb

[matrixmod]

oh wow this actually helped. Thanks

[Umie]

Originally posted by matrixmod:

oh wow this actually helped. Thanks

np

the one disadvantage I just noticed is the buildings in the back look like dog poop, all blurry with terrible textures. I tried turning the quality up to High again, but shortly after the inventory slowdown came back. nope, only way to use RT on the 3070 is to have textures on med.

[MRabbitPG]

Thanks for the info, no wonder sometimes I get massive FPS drop when browsing maps

[Obsessive Power]

It may be possible to fix some of the lower textures on an 8GB card by downloading some texture mods and still use medium textures.

The worst things I've seen with medium textures are poor magazine covers and lower resolution posters that you can find affixed to some buildings walls. Wall graffiti looks pixelated, while roads mostly still hold up, damaged roads with puddles look lower res. It's not terrible, but not great either.

Some these texture mods, even the 2K versions fix these. I'm not sure if they will cancel out medium settings if you download and apply too many though. I've tested it myself, but I've got a 3080 with 10GB.

[yamaci]

another solution is to disable rt shadows and rt local shadows and use rt lighting+rt reflections

also disable hardware accerelated web views on steam settings, and make sure to turn off any background programs that may use VRAM. check your idle VRAM usage. ideally you can reduce the idle VRAM usage on a 1440p monitor down to 400 500 mb range if you can cut everything down

even discord, chrome, edge etc. use VRAM. you can also disable their hardware accerelation and save some VRAM

and as a final extreme measure; you can kill explorer.exe and save some VRAM from there too. here's a code you can use with a bat file to automatically kill explorer.exe and other VRAM-using windows stuff

taskkill /f /im explorer.exe
taskkill /f /im SearchHost.exe
taskkill /f /im StartMenuExperienceHost.exe
taskkill /f /im ShellExperienceHost.exe
taskkill /f /im GameBar.exe
taskkill /f /im SystemSettings.exe
taskkill /f /im dwm.exe

this code will first kill explorer.exe, and then the remnants from it. then it will restart dwm.exe

make sure to do this after having Steam as an active window. then you can Alt+tab to Steam and run the game.

And as a final note: Geforce experience also use some VRAM so you can disable that too if you're not using it.

if you do a whole package effort like me, you will minimize the occurence of VRAM related framedrops in many other VRAM starved games too. it is just how I survive nowadays with my 8 GB 3070. I hate compromising on texture quality so I will go to extremes to ensure I can somewhat get playable framerates on high textures with limited VRAM

[Picklezzz]

This happens to me WITHOUT RT on

[Sir Windchill]

Originally posted by Alceme:

Originally posted by Umie:

You HAVE TO set your textures to medium. If the game exceeds 8GB at any point, you will or MAY experience a terrible menu/UI slowdown bug, which gradually tanks your FPS whenever you access the inventory/map, and you'll need to restart the game every 30-60mins. This has been an issue with RT since CP's release, and this is the only fix to this problem. With that in mind, my game looks and runs better with 2.0 on my 3070 than before. But I don't think NVidia has any interest in fixing this problem (it's a bug with RT itself, not CP). Hopefully this helps the 3060/3070 owners.

i have a 4080 with 16 gb vram and i am getting this issue though lol

Dude I was about to buy a 4080 just for this and you stopped me dead in the track!