Is 8GB of VRAM enough for modern PC gaming? That’s the question a lot of people have been asking lately as prices for graphics cards climb higher, and doubly so since the Steam Machine was announced with a custom AMD GPU with “just” 8GB. A Valve engineer seems to have been working on the problem, and a new kernel patch for AMD graphics cards could deliver greater performance on Linux.
The engineer in question is Natalie Vock, who says she’s an independent contractor for Valve. On her personal blog, she outlines the patch and explains the issue of different programs fighting for limited VRAM resources, straining the video memory on cards with 8GB or less.
“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,” she writes. “That is, until now. Because I fixed it.”
Vock outlines the issue, giving particular attention to browsers, which have become more complex and GPU-intensive as we grow more reliant upon the web and browser-based apps and tools. Poorly optimized allocations between system memory and GPU memory leave games choking as different programs fight for resources.
The problem and solution are both fairly deep computer science stuff, and they require knowledge of Linux that I frankly don’t possess. But the end result is that Vock’s kernel patches dedicated almost the entire AMD GPU memory pool exclusively to the game (Cyberpunk 2077), giving it a lot more room to breathe. The tweaks were able to claw back over 1.3 GB of video RAM, a pretty huge boost, as Tom’s Hardware notes.
AMD
“Generally, it seems like even modern games stay within a memory budget of ~8GB or a bit less, so if you have a GPU with 8GB of VRAM, you should be good to go with today’s games,” according to Vock.
A series of patches and packages, initially designed for the CachyOS distribution with KDE, are required to get this all running. It’s possible to do it on other Linux distributions, but it’ll require more tweaking. How relevant this is for SteamOS—and for the Steam Machine in particular—I couldn’t say. Vock is an independent contractor, and she frames it as a personal project. But it’s certainly possible, and this fix could be useful for the growing number of PC gamers on Linux but not SteamOS (about 75% going by the recent hardware survey).
It’s also worth pointing out that this patch doesn’t really apply to integrated GPUs, even AMD’s very good ones, including those on the Steam Deck, Asus ROG Ally, and Lenovo Legion Go series. But the open-source nature of Linux and the deep collaboration in its community mean that this and other updates could boost the performance of gaming on Linux laptops and desktops.
