The NVIDIA Linux driver doesn’t handle the VRAM sharing with the system RAM. What I’m exactly referring to is this: Windows 10 Task Manager in GPU section As can be seen, there is the “Dedicated GPU memory” and the “Shared GPU memory” that is actual system RAM but shared with the GPU, so in case t…

[image] catt: Just wanted to say I appreciate the thoughtful analysis and systematic look at the issue. :) I think this is the kind of inquisitive mindset we should have. It would be interesting to know what smithay’s authors think of this design/issue… Well, I cannot just make some statemen…

[image] hurikhan77: And behind the curtain, there seem to be a lot of issues that are not particularly optimal - not just in the NVIDIA driver. Yes and since a few days ago, I discovered an amplifier of this problem. niri’s underlying compositor (smithay) has a confirmed memory leak where ev…

[image] hurikhan77: are those design decisions - most likely made 10+ years ago - really the best design for modern desktops and gaming? No matter the answer, NVIDIA needs to adjust now - better sooner than later. We (kinda) know the answer to that one. The TTM API is what major in-kernel dis…

Thanks, this was very insightful. [image] martyn.hare: We (kinda) know the answer to that one. The TTM API This RFC is from 2024. I’m not sure when it was merged. But since the NVIDIA driver is out of tree and has to support LTS distributions, it probably means we can get proper support of i…

I have many similar experiences to this when comparing directly with my experience on windows I don’t know much about the technical details like a lot of people here but I’m experiencing this across multiple games, it’s becoming pretty much the only issue I have with gaming on linux now, is that vr…

i tested in Forever Winter which blows past 8gb vram in ashen mesa and they very much did improve it drastically. I would tank to 15fps before but now can at least maintain a stuttery 60fps

just briefly tested spider-man. still seems to behave a little weirdly but is improved. i let vram reach 8.0gib with very high textures, but at this point firefox wasn’t able to open and initialise correctly

It’s definitely improved, specifically the overall system stability/feel while vram is filled, but personally I am still getting kingdom come deliverance 2 filling up vram and then the output from the game freezes on a frame, I can still hear it in the background and interact with menus and hear it …

That was the reason I created the GreenBoost kernel modules: to orchestrate memory between T1 GPU VRAM and T2 system RAM while keeping all tensor computations on the tensor cores (with no CPU spillover). Today I’ve just released v2.8 after deleting NVidia name from the project (since this is not an…

Non-existent shared VRAM on NVIDIA Linux drivers

Graphics / Linux Linux

faz March 24, 2026, 3:13pm 152

new 595 beta mentions

Improved support for falling back to system memory when available video memory is low, to help prevent Wayland desktop freezes.

will test on Spider-Man remastered once the kernel modules release on github.

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Non-existent shared VRAM on NVIDIA Linux drivers

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