Fix VRAM use for 8 GB GPUs - or don't recommend using one...

[ko]

The system requirement chart that Nixxes put out is pure hogwash. Their "Amazing Ray Tracing" requirements don't hold water.

They have put a 3070 for 1440p@60 fps using DLSS with RT enabled and high settings. But their terrible VRAM management ♥♥♥♥♥ that up and I'm hitting crappy performance from time to time in places like Sargasso. Switching fast to medium textures and back to high will clear it right up, but then it will tank again after a while. Looks like they have some bad VRAM management going on, because that simple texture switch clears it up.

I'm playing on a 3070 Ti with a 5900X and 32 GB RAM (Samsung 970 EVO Plus / Win 10) 1440p / DLSS Balanced - so sub 1080p base resolution. I'm only using RT reflections (not shadows and AO) and I have shadows on medium. The game performs great until it hits the garbage VRAM issues.

Pls fix, Nixxes. You need to do better on 8 GB GPUs. Or don't recommend using one for high settings!

[Terepin]

Don't worry, it runs like garbage even with 12 GB VRAM.

[Bortedet]

I don't think it's the VRAM. I have a 4070ti and I get ♥♥♥♥♥♥ performance especially after hitting manually activated rift stones(or whatever their name is) I check my GPU usage and see it's at 100% but the power consumption is WAY below max. VRAM allocation on the hand is also not at maximum. I quit to main menu and hit "resume" and the performance is good again. I think the problem is related to GPU decompression. Maybe they messed up their implementation of Direct Storage or RTX IO I dunno.

Changing settings or even opening the map can fix or break the performance for me.

[fatezeroxx]

Their poor VRAM management has been around since Spider-Man Remastered and has never been fixed, basically you change any graphics setting in realtime, or alt+tab to toggle game window full screen mode multiple times, performance could be permanent drops, unless you restart the entire game to recover.

When the game eats up VRAM, the texture data continues to overflow into the shared video memory in large quantities and will not be effectively cleared and released, resulting in a continuous decline in performance. this is why some people say that when testing the Spider-Man, you need to restart the game every time when change the graphics settings, I don't know why such a serious VRAM management problem is rarely mentioned, they need to fix this bug as a top priority.

[Bortedet]

Originally posted by fatezeroxx:

Their poor VRAM management has been around since Spider-Man Remastered and has never been fixed, basically you change any graphics setting in realtime, or alt+tab to toggle game window full screen mode multiple times, performance could be permanent drops, unless you restart the entire game to recover.

When the game eats up VRAM, the texture data continues to overflow into the shared video memory in large quantities and will not be effectively cleared and released, resulting in a continuous decline in performance. this is why some people say that when testing the Spider-Man, you need to restart the game every time when change the graphics settings, I don't know why such a serious VRAM management problem is rarely mentioned, they need to fix this bug as a top priority.

I never encountered this with Spider-Man or Miles Morales, was the "high GPU utilization-low power consumption" thing also present in them?

[Cylokin]

There is no VRAM problem here, the performance is just poor in general. I gain only 3 more fps by changing from Very High to Medium Textures.

[fatezeroxx]

Originally posted by Bortedet:

Originally posted by fatezeroxx:

Their poor VRAM management has been around since Spider-Man Remastered and has never been fixed, basically you change any graphics setting in realtime, or alt+tab to toggle game window full screen mode multiple times, performance could be permanent drops, unless you restart the entire game to recover.

When the game eats up VRAM, the texture data continues to overflow into the shared video memory in large quantities and will not be effectively cleared and released, resulting in a continuous decline in performance. this is why some people say that when testing the Spider-Man, you need to restart the game every time when change the graphics settings, I don't know why such a serious VRAM management problem is rarely mentioned, they need to fix this bug as a top priority.

I never encountered this with Spider-Man or Miles Morales, was the "high GPU utilization-low power consumption" thing also present in them?

You need to fill up your VRAM for this to happen, when there is enough VRAM, the texture data will not keep overflowing into shared video memory, this kind of VRAM management issue can easily happen on 6GB or 8GB graphics cards with ultra texture settings.

[Bortedet]

Originally posted by fatezeroxx:

Originally posted by Bortedet:

I never encountered this with Spider-Man or Miles Morales, was the "high GPU utilization-low power consumption" thing also present in them?

You need to fill up your VRAM for this to happen, when there is enough VRAM, the texture data will not keep overflowing into shared video memory, this kind of VRAM management issue can easily happen on 6GB or 8GB graphics cards with ultra texture settings.

I have 12 though, still get performance drops that get fixed when I quit to main menu and resume.

[fatezeroxx]

Originally posted by Bortedet:

Originally posted by fatezeroxx:

You need to fill up your VRAM for this to happen, when there is enough VRAM, the texture data will not keep overflowing into shared video memory, this kind of VRAM management issue can easily happen on 6GB or 8GB graphics cards with ultra texture settings.

I have 12 though, still get performance drops that get fixed when I quit to main menu and resume.

Then this game has already eats up your 12GB VRAM, and a large amount of data has overflowed into your shared video memory, when you change the graphics settings every time, the overflow data will be more, and it will not be effectively cleared and released, resulting in continued performance degradation, need to restart the game to clear the overflow data in the shared video memory.

[Rocket2049]

i'm running on a gtx1050ti i think 4gb vram, i got 8gb ddr2 ram, an intel i5-8th gen, and running on a 5400rpm HDD through USB.
with OBVIOUS stutter and lagging certain "fast loading between warp" sections of course i'm waiting 1-2 mins to load the maps but it's been playable, up till controlling riviet the first time

[Vladiator]

The game was designed around PS5 that has 16GB VRAM. 1440P is gonna need more than 8GB. Tweak the settings to stay within the range.
Any ported PS exclusive will be like that. Look at the specs of consoles and upgrade the GPU to meet the level or more(now it is VRAM and 8 core CPU).

[Kaldaien]

You shouldn't be using RT if your GPU only has 8 GiB of VRAM to be honest.

This game uses a fixed VRAM pool size for texture streaming, it'll fill about 8 GiB of VRAM and then stop. That leaves no room for the Bounding Volume Hierarchy needed for Ray Tracing. You could possibly set textures as low as they'll go, but the streaming pool size isn't going to shrink by that much :-\

This is problematic for users with large amounts of VRAM too, BTW (i.e. my 4090 with 24 GiB of VRAM, only using 11 GiB of it). Game doesn't fill VRAM, so we've got unnecessary overhead from loading textures that could have been kept in VRAM.

[Ichika]

Originally posted by Kaldaien-WillNotReply:

You shouldn't be using RT if your GPU only has 8 GiB of VRAM to be honest.

This game uses a fixed VRAM pool size for texture streaming, it'll fill about 8 GiB of VRAM and then stop. That leaves no room for the Bounding Volume Hierarchy needed for Ray Tracing. You could possibly set textures as low as they'll go, but the streaming pool size isn't going to shrink by that much :-\

This is problematic for users with large amounts of VRAM too, BTW (i.e. my 4090 with 24 GiB of VRAM, only using 11 GiB of it). Game doesn't fill VRAM, so we've got unnecessary overhead from loading textures that could have been kept in VRAM.

Then why they recommended a 3070 for "ray tracing high with dlss" when it's obvious that doesn't cut it, hell even on 1080p i can't run it with dlss and ray tracing and the rating was for 1440@60fps lmao

[Aluminum^1Haste]

This runs surprisingly well on my 7900XTX and 6800XT.
Obviously I'm not running RT, but with everything set to 1440p high or very high, I'm getting anywhere from 100-240 fps depending on the scene.

Can you guys take a screenshot of the area that's problematic so we can compare apples to apples?

[Bortedet]

Originally posted by Aluminumhaste:

This runs surprisingly well on my 7900XTX and 6800XT.
Obviously I'm not running RT, but with everything set to 1440p high or very high, I'm getting anywhere from 100-240 fps depending on the scene.

Can you guys take a screenshot of the area that's problematic so we can compare apples to apples?

It not a specific spot that's problematic. The performance dips are completely random but I solved my problem, fatezeroxx was right, I lowered my texture quality to high from very high and performance seems to be much much better.

[ko]

Originally posted by Kaldaien-WillNotReply:

You shouldn't be using RT if your GPU only has 8 GiB of VRAM to be honest.

This game uses a fixed VRAM pool size for texture streaming, it'll fill about 8 GiB of VRAM and then stop. That leaves no room for the Bounding Volume Hierarchy needed for Ray Tracing. You could possibly set textures as low as they'll go, but the streaming pool size isn't going to shrink by that much :-\

This is problematic for users with large amounts of VRAM too, BTW (i.e. my 4090 with 24 GiB of VRAM, only using 11 GiB of it). Game doesn't fill VRAM, so we've got unnecessary overhead from loading textures that could have been kept in VRAM.

The devs themselves are recommending an 8 GB card for their 1440p RT/high settings requirements with DLSS. And they're only really saying DLSS required for RT shadows/AO which I'm not even using.

I typically don't have issues running ray-tracing and decent textures on my 3070 Ti.

I can also play with RT reflections + high textures for a good while, like 30-45 min. before the frame rate tanks. Then a simple texture settings swap clears up performance again. Like High -> Medium -> High. Something just looks broken here, like a garbage build up in memory or a leak that degrades performance over time.