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
From my understanding, with Nvidia there’s no shared memory on Linux, so when your VRAM maxes out, you get a crash or your game will run in single digit frames.
There is nothing to be done except lowering textures and other VRAM intensive settings, and hoping that one day Nvidia fixes the no shared memory issue.
(I’m assuming you have a Nvidia GPU solely based on those low VRAM numbers)
Ah that would explain the issues and the difference with Windows. I’m on NVIDIA yeah. Going over the VRAM limit and writing into RAM surely isn’t ideal either, but it would beat crashing out entirely. It also seems that Unreal engine 5 games just consume all VRAM they can. Like they’re almost claiming everything they can get away with, but somehow usually work fine. But once I alt+tab or switch workspace there is no VRAM left and Wayland commits sudoku (for good reasons).