Insanely high video memory usage!

[theicewind]

So I've got a new laptop which has 8GB of vram(laptop 3070 ti) compared to 4 my last laptop had. Yay right? Everything should run on ultra, right? Except I ALWAYS run out of vram after 30-60 minutes of playing, which results in more than 2X drop in fps.
Funny thing, my friend's desktop 2070(also 8GB of vram) only consumes a little above 6GB of vram, despite my monitor being 1080p and his 1440p. Even when he disables DLSS or any other upscaling his GPU only needs 6300MB of vram, whereas my constantly sits at 7.5Gb in NMS, which quickly crawls closer and closer to 8GB until the fps drops drastically.

Another funny thing, even after lowering reflections and terrain tesselation to medium it still happens. What could be the reason for such crazy vram usage by NMS specifically? Because other games take about as much vram as I've seen in those videogame reviews. This problem is only present in NMS.
Please help. I dont' want to lower texture settings as I've dreamed of playing on ultra all these years. The GPU power isn't the problem, only the vram is.
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/2431452406427971485/A14B45B5BB2C51DC2E6D8CDEE522C1265C1F8E3A/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false

[Pagafyr]

Do you have the optimal settings for your 3070 Ti set up?
If you don't have the settings Optimized you can use Geforce Experience to do it. If for some reason you don't have Nvidia Geforce Experience installed you can get it from the Internet at Nvidia Geforce Experience > https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/geforce-experience/download/ <. It will help remove any questions as to whether or not your video card is working properly.

[Spocks Toupee]

Originally posted by theicewind:

So I've got a new laptop which has 8GB of vram(laptop 3070 ti) compared to 4 my last laptop had. Yay right? Everything should run on ultra, right? Except I ALWAYS run out of vram after 30-60 minutes of playing, which results in more than 2X drop in fps.

I would turn down some of the Display options that are notorious in any game that use up a lot of VRAM.

Each setting, as you mouse over them should say something to the effect of "This setting uses a lot of GPU" etc...

[Xenomorph]

one thing you should never do is alt-tab while playing nms. Dunno if it's the case, just tossing it out there. Try running windowed.

[theicewind]

Originally posted by Pagafyr:

Do you have the optimal settings for your 3070 Ti set up?
If you don't have the settings Optimized you can use Geforce Experience to do it. If for some reason you don't have Nvidia Geforce Experience installed you can get it from the Internet at Nvidia Geforce Experience > https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/geforce-experience/download/ <. It will help remove any questions as to whether or not your video card is working properly.

What does it have to do with optimal settings? My friend with desktop 2070 is running everything on ultra, maxed out at 1440p resolution and using only 6.3GB of vRAM.
Either way, I've applied "optimal settings" for my GPU in NMS and it set everything to Ultra(because the GPU is powerful enough) and now the game is using EVEN MORE vram. I immediately jumped to 7.8GB of usage half a minute after loading the game. So clearly, the "optimal settings" don't help at all.
I'm thinking it has something to do with resizable bar or Vulcan or something, but can't be sure, I'm not an expert on this. But clearly something's wrong if on my friend's PC it's running perfectly at higher settings with lower memory usage.

[theicewind]

Originally posted by Spocks Toupee:

Originally posted by theicewind:

So I've got a new laptop which has 8GB of vram(laptop 3070 ti) compared to 4 my last laptop had. Yay right? Everything should run on ultra, right? Except I ALWAYS run out of vram after 30-60 minutes of playing, which results in more than 2X drop in fps.

I would turn down some of the Display options that are notorious in any game that use up a lot of VRAM.

Each setting, as you mouse over them should say something to the effect of "This setting uses a lot of GPU" etc...

I did that, like I mentioned, lowered reflections and terrain tesselation. The only thing that actually helps is lowering texture settings, but it's the setting that helps the game look good the most. I didn't get a new laptop so I'd have to lower settings in a 2016 game. Much newer games run just fine on it, including GPU hogs like Cyberpunk.

[theicewind]

Originally posted by Xenomorph:

one thing you should never do is alt-tab while playing nms. Dunno if it's the case, just tossing it out there. Try running windowed.

tried and tried. Still happens but yes, it takes less time to run out of vram if I don't alt-tab. Doesn't fix the problem in the long run though.

[Spocks Toupee]

Originally posted by theicewind:

Originally posted by Pagafyr:

Do you have the optimal settings for your 3070 Ti set up?
If you don't have the settings Optimized you can use Geforce Experience to do it. If for some reason you don't have Nvidia Geforce Experience installed you can get it from the Internet at Nvidia Geforce Experience > https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/geforce-experience/download/ <. It will help remove any questions as to whether or not your video card is working properly.

What does it have to do with optimal settings? My friend with desktop 2070 is running everything on ultra, maxed out at 1440p resolution and using only 6.3GB of vRAM.
Either way, I've applied "optimal settings" for my GPU in NMS and it set everything to Ultra(because the GPU is powerful enough) and now the game is using EVEN MORE vram. I immediately jumped to 7.8GB of usage half a minute after loading the game. So clearly, the "optimal settings" don't help at all.
I'm thinking it has something to do with resizable bar or Vulcan or something, but can't be sure, I'm not an expert on this. But clearly something's wrong if on my friend's PC it's running perfectly at higher settings with lower memory usage.

Ultra Settings = Even more VRAM usage to load the higher res textures etc.

I use DLSS BTW, it helps me get a decent framerate I('m using an RTX 3050 and an i56600

[theicewind]

Originally posted by Spocks Toupee:

Originally posted by theicewind:

What does it have to do with optimal settings? My friend with desktop 2070 is running everything on ultra, maxed out at 1440p resolution and using only 6.3GB of vRAM.
Either way, I've applied "optimal settings" for my GPU in NMS and it set everything to Ultra(because the GPU is powerful enough) and now the game is using EVEN MORE vram. I immediately jumped to 7.8GB of usage half a minute after loading the game. So clearly, the "optimal settings" don't help at all.
I'm thinking it has something to do with resizable bar or Vulcan or something, but can't be sure, I'm not an expert on this. But clearly something's wrong if on my friend's PC it's running perfectly at higher settings with lower memory usage.

Ultra Settings = Even more VRAM usage to load the higher res textures etc.

Except my friend's desktop 2070 doesn't consmume even close to that at higher settings and resolution 🤷‍♂️ So about what you'd expect from such an old game like NMS.
So it'c clearly a driver or Nvidia setting issue or something like that.
I'm just trying to figure out how to bring that vram consumption to my friend's 2070 levels.

[Nettle]

Texture Quality

Sets the size of the textures used throughout the game. As this setting directly impacts video memory (VRAM) usage, it is recommended you follow the guide below when changing this setting.

Recommended video memory requirements, assuming 1080p resolution:

Ultra - 8GB+
High - 6GB
Enhanced - 4GB
Standard - 2GB

Increasing this setting past the available video memory on your system will cause significant performance and stability issues.

This setting affects GPU performance and VRAM usage.

That plus sign looks important. Personally I take it to mean that 'Ultra' needs in excess of eight gigabytes of VRAM; my own experience bears this out as I too have a card with 'only' 8GB and whenever I tried to use that setting stability would indeed suffer enormously.

On the other hand... mine's an RX 5500 XT.

On the other other hand... reBAR. My mainboard supports it with a firmware update so I tried switching it on once, just to see what would happen.

If anything it made the video card work harder to no perceivable benefit.

~~~

Note: according to Google the RTX 2###-series does not officially support reBAR.

[theicewind]

Originally posted by Unarmed Bandit:

Texture Quality

Sets the size of the textures used throughout the game. As this setting directly impacts video memory (VRAM) usage, it is recommended you follow the guide below when changing this setting.

Recommended video memory requirements, assuming 1080p resolution:

Ultra - 8GB+
High - 6GB
Enhanced - 4GB
Standard - 2GB

Increasing this setting past the available video memory on your system will cause significant performance and stability issues.

This setting affects GPU performance and VRAM usage.

That plus sign looks important. Personally I take it to mean that 'Ultra' needs in excess of eight gigabytes of VRAM; my own experience bears this out as I too have a card with 'only' 8GB and whenever I tried to use that setting stability would indeed suffer enormously.

On the other hand... mine's an RX 5500 XT.

On the other other hand... reBAR. My mainboard supports it with a firmware update so I tried switching it on once, just to see what would happen.

If anything it made the video card work harder to no perceivable benefit.

~~~

Note: according to Google the RTX 2###-series does not officially support reBAR.

I know, but how would you explain low vram usage on my friend's desktop 2070 at higher resolution than mine? Again, even when he disabled DLSS(and rebooted) it didn't increase, despite DLSS lowering resolution to increase performance.
And just to think about it - it's a 2016 game, high end GPUs of that time should have handled it perfectly. And 1070 and 1080 only had 8 gigs of vram. Only 1080 ti had 11 gigs in Pascal generation and it came out a year after NMS did. I know NMS had graphical updates since release but the vram requirements for it are downright unreasonable.
So yes, maybe it's re-bar because my 3070 ti supports it. Maybe if I disable it, it'll run just like on my friend's 2070? I should probably try it.

[Nettle]

Originally posted by theicewind:

I know, but how would you explain low vram usage on my friend's desktop 2070 at higher resolution than mine?

I can't explain it. I'm guessing here.

Originally posted by theicewind:

So yes, maybe it's re-bar because my 3070 ti supports it. Maybe if I disable it, it'll run just like on my friend's 2070?

It's possible the older card isn't working as hard because it lacks newer functionality, yes.

[theicewind]

here's a laptop similar to mine, but a lower end GPU, same low vram usage like on my friend's desktop 2070.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr3MzSQovxY

Clearly, using 8GB pretty much after the launch of the game isn't normal.

[Nettle]

Originally posted by theicewind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr3MzSQovxY

Not a fair comparison; that's clearly an older build of the game.

[theicewind]

Originally posted by Unarmed Bandit:

Originally posted by theicewind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr3MzSQovxY

Not a fair comparison; that's clearly an older build of the game.

My friend uses the latest build and his vram consumption is exactly the same as in this video. Unless you've seen drastic improvement in graphics in the game I don't see how it should be much higher now than it was. In fact, the graphics engine\detail hasn't been improving for a few years now. They've added new content, but normal places like planets' looks didn't change at all.

[Spocks Toupee]

Originally posted by theicewind:

Originally posted by Unarmed Bandit:

Not a fair comparison; that's clearly an older build of the game.

My friend uses the latest build and his vram consumption is exactly the same as in this video. Unless you've seen drastic improvement in graphics in the game I don't see how it should be much higher now than it was. In fact, the graphics engine\detail hasn't been improving for a few years now. They've added new content, but normal places like planets' looks didn't change at all.

Maybe you and your friend should compare your nVidia COntrol Panel 3d Settings.