Non-existent shared VRAM on NVIDIA Linux drivers

Graphics / Linux Linux
119

I have a GeForce 750 Ti (2 GB card) and am encountering this issue with the 580 DKMS official drivers. I completely run out of GPU memory opening up a few windows and it causes system instability with programs crashing and my window compositor breaking in unattended ways.

Same device works great on Windows

I’ve had this same computer / hardware for 11 years on Windows 10 and never ran into GPU memory issues. I could have many browser windows open, record x264 videos with OBS and also played an assortment of games. Not once did Windows 10 crash in a decade of this usage.

Problems only on Linux

I switched to Arch Linux with niri (Wayland compositor) the other day and noticed a lot of instability, especially when opening Firefox and trying to record an x264 video with OBS. Likewise Ghostty (hardware accel enabled terminal) would core dump if I opened more than a few instances of it.

I set GLVidHeapReuseRatio to 0 as per the niri guide for NVIDIA cards since Wayland apparently has trouble with this. This helped a lot. nvidia-smi reported using only 75 MB for niri instead of the 1 GB it was using previously.

Ongoing issues

Even with the above, niri’s memory usage climbs up and doesn’t get reclaimed when windows are closed. It’s at 300 MB now for reference.

I notice a lot of instability when the GPU memory reaches about 1.5 GB out of 2 GB. Just 2 Firefox windows will use 400 MB for reference. Ghostty uses about 120 MB per instance.

Basically I can’t open more than a few things at once, but my system is only using 3 GB out of 16 GB of system memory. The outcome is much worse than Windows.

nvidia-smi shows 2048 MB total. When I run nvidia-smi -q it shows:

    FB Memory Usage
        Total                                          : 2048 MiB
        Reserved                                       : 58 MiB
        Used                                           : 1093 MiB
        Free                                           : 898 MiB
    BAR1 Memory Usage
        Total                                          : 256 MiB
        Used                                           : 37 MiB
        Free                                           : 219 MiB

I believe this demonstrates that my system’s memory is not being shared / used by the GPU?

Everything I’ve seen so far indicates as soon as about 1.5 to 2.0 GB of GPU memory is used, everything starts to break and it’s 100% fully isolated to being on Linux only.

Rebooting or restarting niri every few hours isn’t a viable solution. Is there anything I can do to get the NVIDIA drivers to use system memory in the same way it did on Windows?

Thanks.

Even if I did reboot every few hours, it still doesn’t help me do the same workflows I did on Windows with the same hardware. It’s unfortunate because I really want to use native Linux full time. Opening up a few browsers and terminals while recording a 1080p 30 FPS video shouldn’t take down my system when the CPU load is 25% and system memory usage is at 20%.

It’s concerning because NVIDIA mentioned the 580 series of drivers will no longer receive updates after August 2026. 10XX and older cards are the ones that are impacted the most by this as it renders the system kind of not usable (within reason).

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