Natalie Vock, a Linux developer for Valve, has recently taken to their GitHub with a simple fix allowing rigs with less VRAM to run games better. Turns out applications in Linux will hog all the resources they can get, though if you have an Arch-based distro with an 8 GB card, things are about to get better for you.
To put it simply, you will need to get “some kernel patches as well as additional utilities to make use of the kernel capabilities properly.” Vock recommends using the Arch-based CachyOS and installing the packages “dmemcg-booster” and “plasma-foreground-booster.” From here, your games should start to run better on graphics cards with 8 GB of VRAM.
As Vock explains it, during testing, their system tried to “use more VRAM than there was available at all, so something had to give. Instead of telling the app that memory allocation failed (which would mean a near-certain application crash), the kernel decides to kick some memory out of VRAM to make everything fit. This degrades performance.”
Vock notes that, to the kernel driver, all memory looks the same. It doesn’t necessarily differentiate what it should be focusing on and why, so this fix uses cgroups to ‘protect’ certain uses of memory and figures out “how relatively important GPU memory allocations are.”
If you aren’t on CachyOS, the package files are available in AUR, and can be installed with either the CachyOS kernel package on a non-CachyOS system with a repository, or by compiling your own kernel.
As Vock suggests, “Maybe wait a bit” if you don’t use an Arch-based distro, going on to add, “Eventually, I’d expect this to trickle down into more distros.” They’ve also clarified that they plan on updating the GitHub if/when other distros get the trick working.
With the memory crisis currently raging and threatening to continue raising the price of memory, storage, and GPUs, now would be a painful time to upgrade, so holding out with that slightly older card should be a tad easier if you are on Linux.
With the 8 GB Steam Machine still expected to launch in the future, and powered by Arch-based SteamOS, one can assume it will see benefits from this fix, too. It might be why a Valve developer was looking into it in the first place.
“Instead of performance slowly degrading over time, games should perform much more stable – as long as the game itself doesn’t use more VRAM than you actually have.”
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