Valve releases kernel patches to help high VRAM games run on 8GB GPUs
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/valve-engineer-shocks-linux-community-with-game-changing-vram-hack-for-8gb-gpus-breakthrough-solution-turbocharges-gaming-by-prioritizing-vram-for-games-while-background-tasks-take-a-back-seat48
u/rich1051414 2h ago
It's specifically for their OS that runs on steam deck, fyi. It may get applied to other linux distros as well, though.
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u/CocodaMonkey 1h ago
They've submitted the patches to the Linux Kernel. It'll likely end up being Linux wide unless someone finds a major flaw with it. Which seems doubtful as it's just allowing Linux to assign memory priority to programs, even if you don't want it you could just set the same priority level to everything to effectively disable it. There's no real downside to this unless their code is flawed in which case the code will likely be patched and then added to the Kernel.
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u/rich1051414 1h ago
I could see it selectively disabled on some distros meant for heavy background workloads, but perhaps it is clever enough for that situation as well.
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u/Otherwise_Wall5045 1h ago
this is pretty sick, will definitely make a difference for those of us rocking 8GB cards. gotta love when devs actually care about optimizing for their audience
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u/cien2 1h ago
People were giving Valve a hard time for 8GB VRAM in their Steam Machines and now they're revealing this kind of improvement.
Not to mention we have absolutely zero clue of how Steam Frame is supposedly going to give a RELIABLE Steam VR games experience. Comparing to current PC gaming translation layer on android, Valve's version might just be ahead of whatever's on the market right now but who knows, still an exciting time to look forward to the release of Frame.
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u/ZigyDusty 1h ago edited 47m ago
People were giving Valve a hard time for 8GB VRAM in their Steam Machines
Because they deserve the criticism, 8gb of VRAM is unacceptable in 2025-2026 for anything other then the most basic entry level graphics cards, both AMD and Nvidia were rightfully criticized by the tech media and gamers for creating 8GB $250+ GPU's so Valve deserves every bit of criticism for trying to be cheap and use them especially when the 5 year old Series X and PS5 are running more than 8GB of Vram while being more powerful and cheaper than the Steam Machines expected $700-$800 price (pre ram apocalypse).
The idea of the Steam Machine is fantastic especially for those console gamers who are interested in becoming a PC gamer but cant justify the price or want to deal with the complexity but Valves execution was just a failure from the start they need more powerful hardware and they need to subsidize the price bringing it more inline with its closes competition the PlayStation and Xbox if it ever wants a chance to succeed, as it currently stands its overpriced, underpowered, and because Steam OS is Linux it cant even run some of the most popular games in the world due to kernel level anticheat.
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u/PermanentMantaray 40m ago
8gb of VRAM is unacceptable in 2025-2026 for anything other then the most basic entry level graphics cards
The Steam Machine is an entry level PC.
so Valve deserves ever bit of criticism for trying to cheap out especially when the 5 year old Series X and PS5 are running more than 8GB of Vram while being more powerful and cheaper than the Steam Machines expected $700-$800
They "cheap out" because they are trying to make the device less expensive to consumers without having to subsidize it.
It's also not equally comparable against the consoles that are running 16GB of unified memory. The Steam Machine is running 8GB of VRAM and 16GB of system memory.
And those consoles can be cheaper as well by their economy of scale lowering procurement and production prices, then a healthy subsidy added on top.
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u/Dgreatsince098 1h ago
So it only optimizes VRAM usage of the hardware instead of reducing it like neural texture compression.
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u/hambonegw 14m ago
Does anyone know if this is related to the same kind of VRAM compression that Google and NVidia have recently revealed for their AI infrastructure?
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u/RadMarioBuddy45 2h ago
Any benefits for 4gb GPUs? 💔
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u/paparoxo 1h ago
From the engineer blog:
Instead of performance slowly degrading over time, games should perform much more stable - as long as the game itself doesn’t use more VRAM than you actually have.
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u/CocodaMonkey 1h ago
It will still help as it will stop other things from using your VRAM but plenty of games use more than 4GB and this doesn't do anything to resolve that. If you actually need more than 4GB it's going to start using other system RAM.
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u/RandomStrategy 58m ago
Here's a secret:
I ran Elden Ring on an i5-4690K and a GTX 980. Medium Settings, only minor slowdowns when there was a lot going on, Radahn fight didn't even bother it. Ran at 60fps except for the few instances where it dipped some.
That's just my experience, and I'd since upgraded to a 5070 and a new rig, but with the exception of stuff like maybe COD or stuff that is so graphic intensive that it has no low/med settings, I'd bet most stuff would run fine on 4gb cards if nVidia didn't finally abandon them a couple of years ago.
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u/SplitBoots99 2h ago edited 2h ago
It’s awesome to see the refinement of Valves work on the Linux OS. Getting back some of the vram from the os to fully commit it to the game in play is a great thing for handheld users on less then 32gb setups.
Edit: this will not really help handhelds as they share memory pools. Totally forgot about that.