GTX 970 VRAM allocation bug

Here's the full link of the test:

https://mega.co.nz/#!ZwEyFBYa!UMjB9V9XunuMQVXnRmy3MgMX5xEmb7sfPCtITDPNvrA

***Edit: It filled my VRAM(4075MB) so if this can really fill 4GB, it means that the GPU has indeed 4GB, so something's wrong with the drivers i guess.

 

DX11 games running on W8.1 can reserve system ram as zero copy virtual vram, also known as Tiled Resources.
Since the reserved memory is transparent to the OS it won't show up in RAM usage but I think it affects the Commit amount (could be wrong as reserved doesn't necessarily mean in use).

The amount reserved can vary depending on game resource allocation, drivers, and apparently available dedicated vram.


Just throwing that out there.

*Basically what I'm saying is systems with 1x 4GB GPU, 8GB RAM no PF running W8 may crash, same applies to 2x4GB GPU and 16GB ram.


Someone feel free to correct me here.

 

toncij test use 4050 vram for me. Kombustor is wrong ? nvidia driver problem ?

EDIT: With pagefile off toncij test works and use 4083vram and all 6gb of ram but cube is black

 

Could it be that we have Msi Afterburner reporting the used vram incorrectly in some games?

 

Thank you very much but when I run Vramtester.exe it tells me that I am missing D3DCOMPILER_47.dll.Should I reinstall DX.

 

Same problem here.

 

If MSI afterburner is reading memory wrong, then GPU-Z, EVGA Precision X basically everything is reading memory wrong.

I have shadow of mordor sitting at 3773mb vram usage. How did I get it here?
I've been slaughtering uruks in the same map avoiding any area loading screens for an hour. It basically took an hour for the VRAM to climb up to the 3700s from the 3500s.

Right now page file usage is 9534mb, RAM is 5704mb. A normal 4GB GPU would have allocated 4GB right away. Though one thing, bus usage is extremely low, at around 4%. I doubt its actually caching anything, its just not using its memory and purging data where required or VERY slowly shifting it somewhere else.

God I'm about to just give up and buy a GTX980 (probably what nvidia wants me to do). Atleast I might have a chance at Samsung RAM.

 

I am sorry about "D3DCOMPILER_47.dll" missing. That is a lib that is used to compile those shaders on the fly. I can also host it so you can copy it there.

MSI does not show incorrectly because all tools show the very same.

VRAMtester does only this:

it initializes and loads up multiples of the provided texture. It is pure and simple memory fill up. It actually allocates 1000 textures of the provided size, which is ~5 MB. That totals OVER 4GB so it should fill up VRAM at all times. It avoids memory compression, etc.

As those two users up there did test, it works as expected with any kind of modification to memory handling.

D3DCOMPILER_47.dll is a DLL I will provide for your convenience or modify code to use binary shaders. Sorry for that once again, I did that code in quite a rush.

I will also publish full code on Github. It is really not something complicated; mostly very, very basic code.

 

D3DCOMPILER_47.dll error on win 7 x64, win 8.1 x64 all ok

toncij: "seems I need to precompile the shader for you guys, will do"

so try win8 or waiting and ask toncij for help with it

 

I just signed up to keep an eye on this subject.

I would be disappointed if half a gig of memory was in fact crippled in some way on my 970's.

I bought cards with 4GB memory, not 3.5GB's usable memory.

We need some sort of standardized test set with which to compare brands/revisions/models, something that is easily compared, and does not require the purchase of a game some people (like myself, for instance) do not wish to purchase.

I'm happy to run tests on my rig if needed, but would like to see, as I said, some kind of standardized suite for easy, comparative data pools, which may also help in getting an official word from somebody... official.

 

with the vramtester gpu-z and afterburner reports full 4GB of usage.
Shadow of mordor with ultra textures stays around ~3500MB.
Page File on.
i will reboot and test it with pagefile off.

Edit:

Pagefile off now. Vramtester still uses 4048MB. Shadow of mordor crashes. Log says error 2004 (technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc774731%28v=ws.10%29.aspx Resource Exhaustion Detector)

Kombustor also crashes at the 3GB test as reported here a few sites ago.

 

Hi there toncij I have a question for you because you seem to understand theese things quiet well.So I am wondering how these apps like GPU-Z,MSI Afterburner ect. detect the vRAM are they checking somehow the amount of memory or they just read some info inprinted onto the GPU/vBIOS or whatever.And the second thing is that I dubt that all of the manufacturers have decieded to put less memmory than advertised on their cards so this has to be software issue right?Or there is possibility that there is physicaly 4Gb on the GPU and for some reason aren't fully accessable? I don't know please enlighten me on the subject.Thanks in advance.

 

Glad its noticed with the pagefile off like Ive seen it and many others that have seen it happen, its like shared memory bollox tbh. the card is saying we need pagefile to utilize more ram on the card, which in effect should not happen unless the max ram on card is hit.

Not sure drivers could be causing this or even games right now are just not able to work correctly with the 900 series properly right now. Has anyone I wonder actually asked Nvidia direct about memory allocation and given an example and asked for an explanation what was happening with the example?

 

For those missing the DLL, just search your comp. I needed it so, ran a search and found about 10-15 copies included in various apps and games. Just copy the DLL and put it in the folder.

 

1 card won't use full 4gb unless page file is enabled.

2 when card does use more than 3.5gb game starts juddering like limit has been reached.

are both these points correct?

 

I get the crash when kombuster hits about ~2500MB ram without pagefile but i'm gonna test battlefield without now.

Edit:
Ok here the results.

• Battlefield 4 with ultra preset 4xMSAA.
• FHD 1920x1080
• Single player mission shanghai
• First scene in the car

First i forogt to start/log with gpu-z. At this point i set the ingame supersampling option to 170% and ram usage was about ~2700MB. When i switched outside with ALT + TAB and back in the game crashes. I first thought it might be my fault cause i startet gpu-z mid game. But i tried it another two times.
With SS set to 140% i could switch back into the game and play. Ram usage was <2500MB. When i set it to 145% and minimized it, it crashed altrough ram usage was still slightly <2500MB

Before i tested the minimize crash i have started battlefield again.
So BF SS set to 170% switched out -> started gpu-z logging -> back in and crash. Now i started bf again with SS still set to 170% and ram usage again at ~2700. Then i set the SS to 175%. RAM usage was 1 millisec at 3313MB and then again at ~2700. The highest usage reported by gpu-z was 2828MB before it crashed.
The crash when minimizing brings this error (imgur):
T64Y9bi.png

Highest reported ram usage by afterburner (imgur):
D0BizPn.png

 

Unfortunately yes

 

Well something is being caching - or more likely reserving 4GB of system memory. That's why the PF graph in AB (which is not the PF btw) reads 9.5GB.

With that much memory use and 8GB RAM your game must be running like crap. I expect it will crash if you disable the PF. So you need more ram fwiw.....

 

I just tried setting "enable unsafe memory hacks" on the ENB I'm using on Skyrim (Pure Vision).
I started to play and as usual the game stuttered a bit after the first seconds.
But then I noticed that the vram usage was going above the 3.5Gb it usally did.
It got to the full 4GB. Here is a picture of the game with the stats.



Performance was as before using this option. I'm not using a performance ENB and I have a ton of mods instaled.

The stuttering is slighly less, but there's still some. So I think the stuttering we some times feel in the game comes from the game loading assets from the HDD/SSd into memory.
I didn,t check how much ram the game was using at the time....

BTW, in every ENB I tried, I always got 3.5GB of vram usage.

 

Thread starts to lose it's primal objective...

The fact is why bad things start mostly after ~ 3.5-3.6 of Vram usage and NOT why an opengl program crashes or whatever. People pagefile is a Win service that like it or not IS a necessity for OS. I too occasionally find very weird the insane usage of it but NEVER was officially stated by (guess who..) MS that you may disable it.

Another fact (to sum up a bit) is that gtx 970 comes with 4 GB memory however Nvidia should take a good look what's going on with it's utilization after the known Vram "limit", why there is performance loss or at least strong stuttering after it and why using same settings with same fps a gtx 980 is able to use more(almost all chips filled) of Vram. Let's stick with these things and keep this thread as "clearly focused" on them as possible.
Don't get me wrong I have the same issues however if we want attention from Nvidia lets stay strictly on main topic.

(EDIT: that was for many posts BEFORE the two last ones)