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PayPalVRAM management on Linux with AMD GPUs is about to get a whole lot better - which is great news for gaming, especially on the lower-end or hitting VRAM limits. Coming from Natalie Vock, an independent contractor for Valve who has been working on the open source AMD Mesa graphics drivers and it all sounds incredibly impressive.
If you have a GPU with 8GB or less, this is something you're really going to be interested in as it should make games feel a whole lot better on Linux. As Vock said "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" and "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".
The blog post is on the long side and rather technical, but the short version is: their work uses a mixture of Linux kernel patches and some additional utilities (dmemcg-booster and plasma-foreground-booster) to actually ensure games can correctly use all the available VRAM first before anything spills over to system RAM. It's all about making everything see the game as being most important, compared with random background apps.
Pictured - Cyberpunk 2077
From what Vock said, it might even benefit Intel Xe GPUs too. And a patch for the open source NVIDIA nouveau driver was also sent upstream.
If you want to try it out yourself the simplest way right now appears to be with CachyOS with KDE Plasma which has the kernel patches needed at version 7.0rc7-2 and up, along with the needed tools dmemcg-booster and plasma-foreground-booster being available to install.
See the full blog post for more info from developer Natalie Vock.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Quoting: wytrabbitWould this apply to AMD iGPUs too?No, they do not have dedicated VRAM. iGPUs have lower memory bandwidth usually, but access to the whole system RAM. They don't go trough a relatively slow PCIe link to access the main memory, unlike desktop GPUs.
Here the improvement is really to help decide what app to keep in VRAM and what app to "swap out" to system memory, so it doesn't apply to systems without dedicated VRAM.
Last edited by MayeulC on 10 Apr 2026 at 3:34 pm UTC
Quoting: brokkrI have had some games, notably Hitman WoA and Shadows of Doubt, get killed by the memory manager after they had consumed all VRAM (8 Gb) and subsequently all RAM (16 Gb) on my old desktop. So far the only fix has been to make a large swap partition - and play less of those games and for shorter time spans (probably a good idea anyway) Curious to see if this might help.That sounds like a memory leak in the games (or drivers), this shouldn't really help, though the gameplay may be smoother for a while. However, that issue sounds interesting for mesa devs to know about.
Besides a swap partition, you may consider swapping to compressed ram (zram).
Quoting: MayeulCYou're right, of course. It's been almost a year so I kinda forgot the nature of the problem. I did discuss it a fair bit on the EndeavourOS forums but despite some good suggestions and a lot of testing, I never got any closer to finding a solution.Quoting: brokkrI have had some games, notably Hitman WoA and Shadows of Doubt, get killed by the memory manager after they had consumed all VRAM (8 Gb) and subsequently all RAM (16 Gb) on my old desktop. So far the only fix has been to make a large swap partition - and play less of those games and for shorter time spans (probably a good idea anyway) Curious to see if this might help.That sounds like a memory leak in the games (or drivers), this shouldn't really help, though the gameplay may be smoother for a while. However, that issue sounds interesting for mesa devs to know about.
Besides a swap partition, you may consider swapping to compressed ram (zram).
I never really considered reporting upstream. Guess it's worth a shot.
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