It may sound unbelievable to some, but not everyone has a datacenter beast with 128GB of VRAM shoved in their desktop PCs. Around the world people tell the tale of a particularly fierce group of Linux gamers: Those who dare attempt to play games with only 8 gigabytes of VRAM, or even less. Truly, it takes exceedingly strong resilience and determination to face the stutters and slowdowns bound to occur when the system starts running low on free VRAM. Carnage erupts inside the kernel driver as every application fights for as much GPU memory as it can hold on to. Any game caught up in this battle for resources will surely not leave unscathed.
That is, until now. Because I fixed it.
↫ Natalie Vock
The solution is to use cgroups to control the kernel’s memory eviction policies, so that applications that should get priority when it comes to VRAM allocation – like games – don’t get their memory evicted from VRAM to system RAM. Basically, evict everything else from VRAM before touching the protected application. This way, something like a game will have much more consistent access to more VRAM, thereby reducing needless memory evictions that harm performance.
It’s a clever solution that makes use of a ton of existing Linux tools, meaning it’s also much easier to upstream, implement, and support. Excellent work.
Whenever I see something like this, I am very glad that I have tastes in gaming modest/conservative enough that i can build a dedicated ‘game console” out of “high end, but still budget enough to be cheap as dirt now” tech from 2012 and run my games flawlessly.
New AAA projects need to be put on a diet.
There is a perfect example of this in Horizon Zero Dawn. The original release ran on the PS4 and older PC hardware, even with only 4GB of RAM. The update barely runs on modern hardware with 12GB RAM. And the old one arguably looks better. There is a whole generation of games that just don’t look that good (strange “in screen reflections” and multi-frame or temporal blurry trails, it just doesn’t look good outside of still screenshots) and it’s often bewildering that they require such strong hardware.