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.
CaptainN-,
HFW is a particularly bad case, since they went for the wrong things to focus on the sequel. Instead of making a good exploratory adventure, they had a “handlholding” experience for modern gamers (“I need to use my focus”, “here is a ledge I can climb”, “do you see this over there”)… hey give me a real challenge, and let me first see the screen to solve puzzles!
I thought industry learned a thing or two from Elden Ring…
And they sold less than the original for this reason (not counting bundles)
ssokolow,
There are multiple factors in here though.
Truly modern games, like Alan Wake 2 that take advantage of “recent” (hint: 5 year old) features are hard to make, sell less (less compatible hardware) and usually cause massive financial stress for the company.
“Brute forcing” on the other hand works. If your game does not need a new API (say mesh shaders, or path tracing), you can just have the engine run on more hardware even if you want higher amount of raw resources for high end.
And gamers do not help. They want a checklist of features, even though the developers would really want reasonable tradeoffs.
For example, take Starfield. It has massive scale, but people complain about loading screens. One landing zone (9×9 size) is larger than the entire traverseable map of GTA V. That makes “seamless” transition between two of such regions extremely difficult (think switching from GTA V to Witcher 3 for the amount of resource swap needed). But most gamers, and even those in the. media do not care.
You have to have “free roaming open world”, “RPG style skill trees”, “new game plus”, even background NPCs with full motion capture and big name voice actors, full day and night cycle, and the entire laundry list, even for games that makes no sense.
(In the past it was just “multiplayer component”. I was angry back then, but looking back it was naive compared to all the crap added today).
And if you miss on just one item, the media will kill you on ratings (which means loss of sales, and many times loss of jobs)
Which can only be avoided if gamers focus on gameplay first.
Fair point. I keep forgetting how fixated on the “jingling car keys” of game design your average gamer is.
At least there exist YouTube videos trying to educate people about how large open worlds are more likely to make the experience worse than better, all else being equal, because of how they interact with a fixed amount of time to produce content to fit into them and design mechanisms for making finding rewarding things to do in said world sufficiently fun.
ssokolow,
Unfortunately the body of “modern gamers” grow faster than the push for better game design.
(People usually misunderstand “modern gamers” term)
In the past we got SW: KOTOR, now we are relegated to SW: Outlaws. Not that Outlaws is a “bad” game, but KOTOR was a masterpiece.
However it would be rejected by modern gamers: “why can’t I do free roaming open world travel?”, “why is every texture flat, and why did not you add 300,000 voiced NPC lines?”, “why is the combat turn based? I don’t want to think about strategy, give me real time combat”, “but it is now too hard, give me checkpoints every five seconds”
I might be bitter on this, because we saw a great peak of game design in Xbox 360 / PS3 era, and we regressed ever since. Checklists overtook good reasonable designs.
Edit: Did you know loot boxes were introduced by Epstein to Kotick?
And BO3 came with them in 2013… The rest is history.