My transition to full on Linux gaming mostly went okay, but recently I’ve started running into some issues with more demanding games. In games like Cyberpunk 2077, Stalker 2, and inZOI I sometimes get KDE and/or Wayland crashes when the VRAM runs out. In Cyberpunk I can avoid it by not enabling RTX, which is fine. But Stalker 2 and inZOI are basically all-in on raytracing and therefore seem to also fully eat up my 8GB of VRAM.
Is there any way of constraining the games to like 7.5 GB or something? Because they seem to actively work to stay below 8GB, so clearly there is still stuff they can clean up. And even if they’d go over the limit, I’d prefer the game to crash rather than basically having Wayland restart, losing everything I had open. I’m curious for you experiences
Lower settings. Sorry, thats all there is to it. 8GB is not a lot these days (i have two older cards in my PC and they’re both 12). Textures, screen resolution, there’s a bunch you can do.
Crashes are unavoidable, given that everyone wants max performance everywhere, things get shipped with all the debugging and checking stripped.
I know that 8GB is too little. NVIDIA is really stingy when it comes to VRAM unfortunately. Beack when I made the decision this 3070Ti was the most expensive I could buy and I needed CUDA for some projects I was working on. Back then AMD’s ROCm had bad support on consumer GPUs and also in libraries, so I didn’t have a choice. I’m hearing better noises now though, so maybe my next card will be AMD.
Either way, I’d expect at most the game to crash. That would be acceptable, though annoying. Preferably it’d use the RAM as a sort of swap, which would grind everything to a halt but wouldn’t outright kill the game or my desktop. I really shouldn’t be losing all open windows