Non-existent shared VRAM on NVIDIA Linux drivers

Graphics / Linux Linux
79

I’ve been able to play via setting my default GPU to the iGPU in plasma.

~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/auto_kwin_drm.sh

#!/bin/bash

nvidia_has_outputs=$(grep -l "^connected" /sys/class/drm/card?-*/status)

if [[ "$nvidia_has_outputs" == *"card1"* ]]; then
# Set igpu as primary renderer when it has at least one output connected
    export KWIN_DRM_DEVICES=/dev/dri/card1:/dev/dri/card0
else
# otherwise, set dgpu as primary renderer
    export KWIN_DRM_DEVICES=/dev/dri/card0:/dev/dri/card1
fi

Courtesy of someone on reddit (made changes to match my card and not disable the dGPU since it seems their use case was for a laptop).

Now everything except games run on the iGPU for me, allowing me to not cap out my VRAM, I allocated 8GB of RAM to the iGPU in bios which isn’t a problem for me but I could see it being an issue for others. This is a very serious problem with games pushing VRAM more and more. When playing Stellar Blade I’m sitting at 13GiB utilization, and that’s only the game.