GTX 970 VRAM allocation bug

We just have to wait for official nvidia's statement.

 

You don't have enough RAM.

You don't have enough RAM.

You don't have enough RAM.

You don't have enough RAM.

You don't have enough RAM.

You don't have enough RAM.

You don't have enough RAM.

 

^^^lmao

 

Just tried the first mission of Crysis 3 at 4K with 8xMSAA, it reached ~3750MB, no stuttering at all.

 

You win hard. Tested and confirmed.

That explains the maxed out system commit memory I have been seeing in Process Explorer.

 

8gb is not enough ram okkkk lool who is this guy.

 

Who are you?

do I get a prize?

Well after repeating myself in several posts I didn't know how to make it any clearer....

It's like BF3 all over again but worse lol.

 

Yup.

 

Well, I tested one of the games I have that I thought might use 4GB, FarCry 4.

4k with, I think, everything as high as it will go.

I topped out at 3525. Game is pretty unplayable at those settings, 40-45 fps in the village, but mostly its because of the weird flashing shadows (all the shading appears to shimmer when moving the camera), and also a weird ghost image, but I think that happens when you alt tab out.

That said, are 980s using 4GB ram on max settings at 4k?

 

Yes. :thumbup:

Most average users don't understand how Windows memory managment works. RAM usage in TM doesn't tell half the story...

Guess that makes you above average.

 

Well your system must be special then as I never max out the commited here, and it still leaves 3.5gb of system memory available. You know as well as most people that its supposed to use up system ram if its available period....

 

Process Explorer:
Can even show which executable is using how much vram.

I think I am done with this thread until we hear something official-er from nvidia. My systems / hardware-foo is too lacking to keep guessing at stuff.

 

My system is not special.

How would you know that? Besides, I said before GPU reserved memory may not count against the commit charge. Or do you even understand what I mean?

No I wouldn't know that, maybe you could enlighten me? On 2nd thoughts never mind, I can see where this is headed.

 

Pill monster needs to take a pill me thinks and buy a 970, not sure I saw it say "ati card owners thread"

Anyhow moving on I will most def check it all out with a few more games on PE.

 

Okey-Dokey, sorry to be a bother. Good luck on your mission.

 

interesting.I am using real vision ENb and i tried it and i am still capped bellow 3600MB

 

It is worth to add that this kind of issues are not exclusive to GTX970.
It occurs with other cards from different generations.
Such problems, with system info, video proff, etc, have already been submitted to Nvidia customer care but no further action was taken by Nvidia.

Example of video proof with GTX660 2gb, i52500, 8gb of ram, windows 8:

youtube link:

/watch?v=m_JxKWbfVdE

Pay attention to the two video memory readings in the OSD (Afterburner plus HWinfo64).
The first at ~1900 is card VRAM and the second at ~160 is dynamic VRAM.
At about 0:40 in, the card frees 400mb and the dynamic vram goes up.
From there the performance degrades and slow downs are observed randomly.

 

I tried unsafe memory hacks in Skyrim and still can't get to 4000mb.

 

660/ti uses 192-bit memory bus with 2GB of VRAM so that is to be expected.

 

Those tools do it on hw level, not through DirectX I guess. There are multiple ways you can get some info about memory, but none of those significantly reliable. You can try Nvidia Nsight or something like that.

I'm a programmer, but I'm not an expert on 3D graphics so I can't tell exactly with precision.

The test here solely fills up memory with textures.

In reality, there are multiple types of data structures you create in D3D and for each and every of those a GPU BIOS/driver may have different memory management strategy/caching/flushing/paging etc.
Even for different sets of textures it can have different way of managing them so we may see full 4GB usage with this texture of mine, but in some other situation it may as well stop at 3.5, 3.6, 3.7 or 3 GB.

Direct3D always tracks available texture memory and calculates what textures are needed and what are not and those algorithms vary in complexity and ways of work.

It may be dependent of how much processing power card has and how it handles the specific data type. If 980 does not leave itself "space" after 3.5GB in some cases and 970 does, it may be related to types of data it manages in that memory. Maybe it will fill it to 4GB with this texture size and type (32bpp ARGB unsigned 1k) and not with some other format. It may fill everything with dynamic textures and not some shared (dynamic textures can't have D3DPOOL_MANAGED pool).

Games, on the other hand, are by multiple levels of magnitude more complex beasts. Games can employ all kinds of hardware or software hacks and tricks to optimize for something nobody is aware of.

In the end, it is solely responsibility of Nvidia to check up on this. They're the only entity that can truly determine what problem is causing erratic behavior and why. They have access to driver, BIOS and other required code, algorithms etc nobody here can have. We're just guessing (presumably wrong) and they can just test to know.

However. The very fact seems to be that memory chips I've seen are 32-bit Samsung making combined 256-bit bus and 4GB of VRAM and that I can make GPU to show me full usage of 4GB of VRAM.

Nothing more, nothing less - There is nothing else I can actually prove without significant testing of hundreds/thousands of possible combinations a game can do: texture formats, types and sizes, other data, algorithms etc. And even then I wouldn't be able to exactly know what is going on.