its been confirmed by nvidia team that the GPUs can use system ram as fallback for a very very long time. That’s not the issue.
The issue is that the nvidia drivers are very inefficient at allocating vram. Games on windows which would use a certain amount of vram would go up to double that on linux.
The drivers can use system RAM for games but I’m guessing they can’t really handle an overcommit very good.
As an example, Indiana Jones The Great Circle crashes if it reaches VRAM limit even if it doesn’t actually go above available VRAM, on Windows the game might start to stutter instead but it does not crash.
And as for Linux desktop apps, I have no idea. I also don’t how to check how much SysMem the apps use.
In Windows 11 you can do that by adding the correct columns in Task Manager.
With that being said, I have absolutely no idea how VRAM/shared SysMem works in Linux.
How does AMD do in this regard on their lower end cards when they hit VRAM lmiit? I mean, if it works for them, it’s purely an Nvidia issue.