video memory question

[SirJ]

moin,

 

 

I just came across a curiosity:

the dcs fps print shows me a video memory of 8.3GB which only apply to 5.sth gigs on my 1070 (out of 8GB max). Also shared memory does not ssem to be used.

Any idea where the rest of 3gb have been gone?

 

 

best regards

[Gierasimov]

It reports available memory and not used memory I think.

[Worrazen]

The closest theory I figured of what "Video mem" shows is that it counts the size of all assets (textures, and what else can go to VRAM) that were loaded by the game to the GPU in the whole current DCS session, and apparently it's not counting the assets which were at some point already loaded previously in the same session, the number seems to always rise and will never go down, at least i've never seen it going down in all +4 years, however DCS is way too big for VRAM so a lot of offloaded to RAM anyway so that number isn't really showing the state of VRAM as you can see, but the system doesn't tax the GPU's VRAM to the max unless you put it to a harsh stress test (like loading up a ton of textures on purpose-> view everything in encyclopedia)

 

 

 

I'm not sure what's the usefulness of this info for the developers, it may be some specific benchmark case, but I haven't found any use for it yet in any of the things I was doing so I'm simply ignoring it. If there is some use and it's really functioning it suppose to, then I feel it is mislabeled/misleading and just confuses MANY people.

 

 

https://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=234041

 

 

You can subscribe to that thread as I intend to do more updates to those issues there, I would have done it already but I had other stuff come in the way. Yes the videos don't have the full DIAG INFO since I forgot to enable it for the recordings.

Edited May 12, 2019 by Worrazen

[Harlikwin]

Yeah, I'm not really sure what that number means, but for reference that tool reported I was using like 6-8gb VRAM with my GTX980M which only had 4GB vram. So I'm not really sure how accurate it was. Currently on my new system its in excess of 12GB VRAM (2080ti has 11gb).

[The_Nephilim]

guys I used to think the same thing but look again at the VRam it is Gb with a small B so it is bits not bytes..

[Worrazen]

Ah those standards aren't well respected by anyone, you should never assume it's correct IMO. There's a split on the SI/IEC/JEDEC standards for Giga or Gibi anyway and most old programmers don't care about IEC's Gibi and just ignore it, I kinda agree, while the term "mega" means 1000, it should mean 1024 when dealing with bytes because that's the computer defacto, there's no 1000 bytes of anything so why bother just use the same term and under the hood it's 1024 and problem solved :p

 

 

I pulled the screenshots from my testing videos I did for the aforementioned thread, I forgot to enable the DCS Diagnostics when I was doing the final videos, so here is one when the usage was pretty high: