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Title: Testing the VRAM valve patch
Koopa 18 Apr 2026
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Hi guys and gals.. I've been testing the valve VRAM patch and got funky results. I know that its intended for setups with less than 8gb, but the results are interesting nevertheless.
Setup:
Ryzen 5700X. 24GB DDR4 RAM, Radeon 6700XT 12GB.
I've tested with the VRAM patch and without it same kernel (7.0)

Cyberpunk with the patch
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Cyberpunk without the patch
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3D Mark firestrike
With the patch
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without the patch
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And this is really funky... I got far worse results with Shadow of the tomb raider with the patch applied

with the patch
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without the patch
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other games I tested were Batman AK, and RDR2 but both had no difference, fps were the same.

Last edited by Koopa on 18 Apr 2026 at 9:31 am UTC
Liam Squires-Hand 18 Apr 2026
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Approved the post but please use a different image service, Imgur is banned in the UK.
Koopa 18 Apr 2026
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Quoting: Liam DaweApproved the post but please use a different image service, Imgur is banned in the UK.
Ok then I will edit the post and fix it!
Koopa 18 Apr 2026
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Should I delete the post and do it again? because I cannot edit the post anymore, its somehow marked as read only. Or maybe the editing went into the moderation queue, for approval? I replaced the links with catbox.

Last edited by Koopa on 18 Apr 2026 at 9:16 am UTC
Liam Squires-Hand 18 Apr 2026
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Approved, posts with links / images always go in the queue.
mr-victory 18 Apr 2026
is the only difference the VRAM patch or are you upgrading the whole kernel?
Koopa 18 Apr 2026
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Quoting: mr-victoryis the only difference the VRAM patch or are you upgrading the whole kernel?
I compiled the kernel with the patch and then compared to the results form the standard mainline kernel from ubuntu, same kernel 7.0... but also you need two userspace utilities. Its specified in the GOL article, in the original post from the dev referenced in the article there is more instructions.
I've tested on Kubuntu 25.10, so I had to compile everything manually. Unless you are using an Arch Linux based distro which you can use AUR, you have to compile manually.

Last edited by Koopa on 18 Apr 2026 at 10:44 am UTC
Avehicle7887 18 Apr 2026
Interesting results, does this mean the patch may give better performance even if you're not running out of vram?
Koopa 18 Apr 2026
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Quoting: Avehicle7887Interesting results, does this mean the patch may give better performance even if you're not running out of vram?
Yeah afaik yes... its explained in the valve developer website. Not only free ups memory, but improves memory allocation, in the sense that games sometimes dont allocate properly into the GPU vram, but they allocate into the System RAM, this improves allocating using more the VRAM instead of the system RAM.

However, a lot of memory allocations also end up in a memory region referred to as “GTT”. This is memory that is accessible by the GPU, but physically located in system RAM. From the GPU’s point of view, system RAM memory has to be accessed over the PCI bus. Accessing memory over the PCI bus is typically really, really slow. On my system, instead of the 256GB/s bandwidth VRAM could provide, we’re suddenly stuck with a meager 16GB/s at absolute maximum, paired with significantly worse latency.
AFAIK the patch works both ways it will try to max out your VRAM usage, if you have spare VRAM, because VRAM bandwidth is much better than system RAM... and if you are running low on VRAM it will free up VRAM.
thats why its sold as VRAM management, and not VRAM cleaner lol

Last edited by Koopa on 18 Apr 2026 at 6:45 pm UTC
Koopa 18 Apr 2026
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and I think I figured out why Shadow of the TR peformance is so terrible, because that specific game and any Feral game, ship with gamemode, and gamemode is causing troubles like a racing condition with the valve VRAM booster, both are fighting for resources on how to optimize the game.
Its definitely that, because if I run cyberpunk 2077 with gamemoderun, the crippled performance is identical to what I am experiencing in Shadow of the TR...
Gamemode and this VRAM booster are incompatibles.

Last edited by Koopa on 18 Apr 2026 at 5:50 pm UTC
Avehicle7887 21 Apr 2026
This VRAM work has been doing the rounds all over tech sites. Found this benchmark YT video in case anyone's wondering how it runs on 8GB GPU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dXMMwGDW-w
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