ezst036 Valve is miles, miles ahead of Microsoft in terms of customer support and trust. This action highlights why. EDIT: Does Windows already do this VRAM functionality today? Perhaps it does and I suspect it does. The specific technical merits of this feature is not the point. Microsoft wants things, and customers want things. Microsoft prioritizes what Microsoft wants. That is the point. And what does Microsoft want? Copilot. We all know it. Reply
Math Geek no idea how it normally works, but these seems like common sense to me. prioritize what's actually on the screen vs something i can't see at the moment for my gpu to focus on. wonder how it works with dual screens. does the game still get first dibs on screen 1 and the youtube/discord/browser/monitoring software/etc get neglected on the second screen? just curious Reply
abufrejoval I only got more questions… First of all, showing a game console with an iGPU in this context is misleading, because there "VRAM" may be unified DRAM in that case, even if those tend to partition that into distinct pools with distinct policies, too. Second, I'd be surprised that VRAM on a dGPU is actually under (more than very basic) OS memory management control, so whatever an OS might want to do there, is likely to interfere with what a game may be doing and doing intentionally, because it's trying to emulate a real-time environment on a batch OS like Linux (or Windows etc.). Now, there may be some degree of collaboration between processes using a GPU that is even visible to the OS and mechanisms to ensure that VRAM is freed if a game exists, etc. But the OS managing VRAM almost as if it were DRAM, that's a rather big paradigm shift, I'd be very surprised to have missed completely. Here system DRAM would almost function as paging backing store to VRAM, no current OS is mentally ready or capable to take on this responsibility. If a game choses to push game content from VRAM to system memory (potentially mapped into the GPUs memory space), that sounds like a deliberate choice to me, that no outsider should interfere with, while game is running . Reply
Sam Hobbs abufrejoval said: Here system DRAM would almost function as paging backing store to VRAM I asked Perplexity AI about that before reading all the comments here. As best as I understand what it says, and I might misunderstand it. GPUs can use main memory like a paging device. The solution described here adds the additional criteria of background versus foreground. abufrejoval said: If a game choses to push game content from VRAM to system memory I think that this technology functions at a system level, it would not be something an application (game) would do. For example a browser might be using VRAM and it is considered to be a background process. The browser content might be moved to VRAM, not the foreground game. Reply
Bonaducci Math Geek said: wonder how it works with dual screens. does the game still get first dibs on screen 1 and the youtube/discord/browser/monitoring software/etc get neglected on the second screen? just curious Windows recognizes what is in focus, so it can let drivers prioritize what is actively used vs what is visible but not in focus. Same with games, they can reduce frame rate when not in focus. Reply
heffeque but keep in mind they'll only work on AMD GPUs because Nvidia drivers have closed-source memory management. Welp… Linus already voiced his opinion about nVidia years ago, so I'm not surprised nVidia is still subpar on Linux today. Reply
ejolson Linux is by design a multiuser multitasking system. As a result, the default scheduling and memory management algorithms prioritize fairness and throughput. Therefore, I am not shocked that there are optimisations for running a single video game faster. It will be interesting if the GPU driver patches are generally useful and robust enough to be included in the mainline Linux kernel. If so, some users might use the same framework to deprioritize all graphical applications to run AI workloads faster. On the other hand, if prioritising one application decreases total GPU throughout too much, impressions of general system responsiveness will suffer and one might as well run Microsoft Windows. What I find nice about open source is Valve can innovate what they need as needed. Reply
TerryLaze ejolson said: Linux is by design a multiuser multitasking system. As a result, the default scheduling and memory management algorithms prioritize fairness and throughput. Therefore, I am not shocked that there are optimisations for running a single video game faster. I don't even know for how many years we had this already on windows…. You can freely choose between prioritizing foreground apps or having it run more like a server. Personally I am shocked if linux didn't have this until now, although vram priority is a different matter than this. https://www.isunshare.com/images/article/windows-10/2-ways-to-set-cpu-priority-to-prefer-foreground-apps/adjust-best-performance-for-programs.png Reply
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/valve-engineer-shocks-linux-community-with-game-changing-vram-hack-for-8gb-gpus-breakthrough-solution-turbocharges-gaming-by-prioritizing-vram-for-games-while-background-tasks-take-a-back-seat#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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