4.5 Vram cap?

[DustinMock]

4.5 Vram cap?

After a fairly long play time the memory usage on my GPU's slowly crawls up until it hits 4.5 gb of usage then the game starts to go stutter a bit and finally crash. Problem is I'm using a pair of Titan-X GPU's so 4.5 gb of usage is nothing. Is this some engine limitation? I had gone into the ini files and increased the memory budgets knowing I have 12gb to play with so might as well put it to good use but if the engine is limiting it for whatever reason (guessing that's the limit on the consoles?) maybe I'm not.

Discovered this by using the Precision X16 on screen display to post up Vram usage to see how much the game used and never bothered to take it off. Sure as can be though, starts around 3.5gb and 2 or 3 hours later after it's climbed to 4.5gb, game freezes up on me.

Any thoughts, or suggestions on how to fix this or is it a hard cap that would require a patch to fix?

 

[monster528]

What settings did you change to allow it to get that much vram usage? I have never gone above 2.5gb on max settings

 

[eskiMoe]

I had gone into the ini files and increased the memory budgets knowing I have 12gb to play with so might as well put it to good use but if the engine is limiting it for whatever reason (guessing that's the limit on the consoles?) maybe I'm not.

How did you do this? Even with my 970s I still have roughly 1GB of unused VRAM even at max usage that I could happily use as cache. Maybe some textures would load faster.

 

[DustinMock]

How did you do this? Even with my 970s I still have roughly 1GB of unused VRAM even at max usage that I could happily use as cache. Maybe some textures would load faster.

there is a budget.ini file in the witcher3\bin\config directory i believe that lets you make changes and actually has explanations of how to change them.

Also in the documents\witcher3 directory in the user.settings file under [rendering] there is a memory budget option.

I'm not at home right now, but when I get home this evening I'll post up the specifics of what I changed.

 

[me3850]

there is a budget.ini file in the witcher3\bin\config directory i believe that lets you make changes and actually has explanations of how to change them.

Also in the documents\witcher3 directory in the user.settings file under [rendering] there is a memory budget option.

I'm not at home right now, but when I get home this evening I'll post up the specifics of what I changed.

i don't have budget.ini file...??? are u sure??

 

[DustinMock]

i don't have budget.ini file...??? are u sure??

not entirely sure, just pulling from memory still. Up at work at the moment, won't be for another few hours before I can go back and verify exactly.

may be called resources.ini, it's a fairly obvious name though.

 

[eskiMoe]

Yup. It's resource.ini.

; Maximum memory budget for compressed data; The bigger, the faster the loading
; Note: the memory is not pre allocated, it's just tracked and limited
MaxCompressedBudget = 30

; Maximum memory budget for uncompressed data; The bigger, the faster the loading
; Note: the memory is not pre allocated, it's just tracked and limited
; Note2: this should always be bigger than MaxCompressedBudget value, usually x2.5 times (average compression ratio)
MaxUncmpressedBudget = 70

So if I change the compressed value to 40, uncompressed value should be something like 100?

Could @GuyNwah sensei or @sidspyker give their 2 cents on this? Would raising these values improve texture loading/streaming? Or maybe even performance..?

 

[DustinMock]

mine is set to 100 and 250

 

[GuyNwah]

Higher values will reduce "thrashing" at the expense of using more memory.

They mean "I'll hold this much (compressed, uncompressed) texture stuff. If I need a texture I don't already have loaded, and I need memory to load it, I'll evict a texture I haven't used in a while, and steal its memory."

If you get into a situation where you can't hold enough textures and have to keep reloading textures you just unloaded, that's thrashing, and it will hurt performance. If you are tuning carefully, you will find that performance decreases slowly as you reduce these budgets, then decreases more sharply. You want to be above the point where this happens.

It shouldn't be important on large-VRAM cards, and I think 3GB to 4GB is large enough that you can set them high and not worry about it. It will matter a lot more on cards below 2GB.

 

[DustinMock]

Higher values will reduce "thrashing" at the expense of using more memory.

They mean "I'll hold this much (compressed, uncompressed) texture stuff. If I need a texture I don't already have loaded, and I need memory to load it, I'll evict a texture I haven't used in a while, and steal its memory."

If you get into a situation where you can't hold enough textures and have to keep reloading textures you just unloaded, that's thrashing, and it will hurt performance. If you are tuning carefully, you will find that performance decreases slowly as you reduce these budgets, then decreases more sharply. You want to be above the point where this happens.

It shouldn't be important on large-VRAM cards, and I think 3GB to 4GB is large enough that you can set them high and not worry about it. It will matter a lot more on cards below 2GB.

But that doesn't really explain why the game likes to crash once it gets up over 4.5gb usage of Vram though. It's not a hardware thing since I'm rocking 12gb of vram, hence why I'm curious if it's an engine limitation and I've set the resource management so high that once it reaches a certain point it causes conflicts within the engine itself.

 

[GuyNwah]

But that doesn't really explain why the game likes to crash once it gets up over 4.5gb usage of Vram though. It's not a hardware thing since I'm rocking 12gb of vram, hence why I'm curious if it's an engine limitation and I've set the resource management so high that once it reaches a certain point it causes conflicts within the engine itself.

That's a different problem. I can't tell you whether it's an engine issue or a graphics card or driver issue, or a Windows or DirectX issue. Only the real tech support people, who have direct access to the code and the developers who can explain it to them, will be able to tell.

Anything that would cause the available memory on the graphics card to be read false could have that effect.

(Also, if that 12GB VRAM is on two cards in SLI, you actually have 6GB.)

 

[MUPPETA]

But that doesn't really explain why the game likes to crash once it gets up over 4.5gb usage of Vram though. It's not a hardware thing since I'm rocking 12gb of vram, hence why I'm curious if it's an engine limitation and I've set the resource management so high that once it reaches a certain point it causes conflicts within the engine itself.

With my uber distance and shadow ini and rendering settings I'm using max 3,5 vram gb,
didn't experience any crash (still on patch 1.03 version)

 

[eskiMoe]

@DustinMock

I also experienced a crash after messing with the values so I left them at default settings (although not sure if it was the case, patch 1.04 is a bit unstable)

But I noticed that you can go to documents/witcher3 and tweak texturememorybudget value beyond the ultra value (800) in user.ini. I set mine to 1100 and did notice the game using more VRAM in Novigrad.

 

[Senteria]

But that doesn't really explain why the game likes to crash once it gets up over 4.5gb usage of Vram though. It's not a hardware thing since I'm rocking 12gb of vram, hence why I'm curious if it's an engine limitation and I've set the resource management so high that once it reaches a certain point it causes conflicts within the engine itself.

Maybe your rig too good for the game.

 

[DustinMock]

That's a different problem. I can't tell you whether it's an engine issue or a graphics card or driver issue, or a Windows or DirectX issue. Only the real tech support people, who have direct access to the code and the developers who can explain it to them, will be able to tell.

Anything that would cause the available memory on the graphics card to be read false could have that effect.

(Also, if that 12GB VRAM is on two cards in SLI, you actually have 6GB.)

Nah, Titan-X have 12gb of Vram on each GPU.

I did some testing adding a bunch of options to the OSD and toying with the totals on the resources.ini file. The compressed and uncompressed values were actually increasing my system ram usage while the texture memory budget in the user.settings file was responsible for the Vram totals.

It just so happened that the two slowly crawled up at a similar pace giving the impression that it was the vram usage that was the culprit.

Increasing texture memory budget did indeed allow my Vram to grow higher than 4.5gb just fine (I had increased that total initially when I installed the game, hadn't touched it until I began testing for the issue of my crashing), however increasing the compressed and uncompressed max values in the resources.ini caused the game to crash once Witcher 3 broke past the 8 gb of system memory usage (program itself, total system usage was around 10) when it crashed.

TL;DR Resource.ini setting adjustments effect system memory usage. Careful not to break 8 gb used by the game itself.