Firestorm using too much RAM and likely to be AMD issue?

[aurorayok2006]

Hello! just to straight to the point as the title said 

1. this is my PC spec with AMD RX 460 gpu

2. when i just stand at my platform with nothing much on it's already run to 2k

and when i go to high objects places it run to 10k which is pretty weird for 16gm ram right???

what do i have to do for the graphic setting ? as i have read many forums i couldn't understand pc technique language 😭

[Wulfie Reanimator]

It does seem high, though high memory usage isn't necessarily a problem on its own. Are you having performance problems or crashing?

Edited April 19, 2023 by Wulfie Reanimator

[aurorayok2006]

19 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

It does seem high, though high memory usage isn't a necessarily problem on its own. Are you having performance problems or crashing?

it doesn't lag or crashes at all, my fps mostly run over 50 at high objects sims, the only problem is when i stand at those high objects  sims sometime RAM can gets full and it crashed everything including my pc lol which is pretty weird , i asked my friend and she also had 16GM ram and when we're at the same sim, mine ran at 10k and hers is just at 1k , so we suspected it was from AMD issue 😭😭

Edited April 19, 2023 by aurorayok2006

[Kathrine Jansma]

I saw such crashes with current AMD drivers, but i have a peculiar setup with 2 AMD graphics cards, which confuses the memory estimation code. (but wasn't Firestorm either).

You could disable the dynamic memory settings of Firestorm and set some more conservative memory limit, as the card has "only" 2 GB VRAM available.

[aurorayok2006]

1 hour ago, Kathrine Jansma said:

I saw such crashes with current AMD drivers, but i have a peculiar setup with 2 AMD graphics cards, which confuses the memory estimation code. (but wasn't Firestorm either).

You could disable the dynamic memory settings of Firestorm and set some more conservative memory limit, as the card has "only" 2 GB VRAM available.

i already disabled the dynamic memory and it still runs on 2k on blank platform 😔

how do i do the conservative memory limit setting?

[EnCore Mayne]

get.more.ram. 32g minimum.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

10 hours ago, EnCore Mayne said:

get.more.ram. 32g minimum.

That's not really a reasonable solution. 😋

[EnCore Mayne]

not reasonable. but effective.

[AmeliaJ08]

Are you confident that Firestorm is actually using your dedicated GPU? (the RX460)

That RAM usage does seem very high for Firestorm which is making me think maybe this is possibly your integrated GPU (UHD 630 for that i5-10400 I think) is allocating system RAM to use as its video memory.

 

Edited April 22, 2023 by AmeliaJ08

[Aishagain]

This issue of high RAM use in Firestorm is something I am currently trying to assess.  I sometimes encouter FS using in excess of 8GB RAM, and while my GPU (NVidia GTX1660Ti) has 6GB VRAM, I find that Firestorm not only uses a LOT more RAM in a given location, it seems unable to detect the full 6GB, starting to swap to system RAM at anything over 4GB, which is the value set by the viewer as MINIMUM texture memory if I use the Dynamic Texture Memory management in the viewer.

It almost seems to regard that 4096MB value as not the MINimum VRAM availablr to the viewer  but the MAXimum, above which my system RAM is deployed (I have 32GB of 3200MHz RAM on my system which is substantially more than I am ever likely to use).

Now that "spillover" into system RAM is not a problem capacity wise (I have never seen the viewer use much more than 8GB), it causes stutters if I actively cam around at a busy venue (such as at a poplular club.  Setting a lower quality is actually counter productive under "high" and I always use the Advanced Lighting Model.

So far I have NOT observed such issues on the Linden Viewer, though setting that horrible device up has given me the heebies, and since you cannot set dynamic memory management up in the LL viewer (or at least I'm not able to find the setting in debug), the comparison is invalid.

I should say in addition that I have used FS with dynamic texture memory deactivated, and while I see no stutters I get substantial texture thrashing, though not of moving textures, ie those attached to avatars.

So far I have no solid conclusions and the support team at FS, while being initially helpful, have added nothing to my understanding of the phenomenon.

ETA: By the way the 1660Ti is my ONLY GPU.

FETA: Using the latest Linden Viewer (6.6.10) I observe the  viewer uses a LOT less RAM in a given situation but due to the ridiculously low level of texture memory this viewer uses (512MB) which cannot be increased  via Debug (I tried), the texture thrashing observed was considerable but over a short test in a challenging scene no stuttering was observed.

Edited April 22, 2023 by Aishagain

[Kathrine Jansma]

16 hours ago, Aishagain said:

I find that Firestorm not only uses a LOT more RAM in a given location, it seems unable to detect the full 6GB, starting to swap to system RAM at anything over 4GB

The 6GB of VRAM of your card are needed for more than just textures.

e.g.

• Framebuffers to render into ( maybe 100 MB, depends)
• Shader programs
• Vertex Data
• Textures
• Depth Buffers
• and so on

so clamping use at 4GB for just textures is probably reasonable. 

The stuttering is more likely a different issue, related to how new textures are loaded, decoded, bound and transferred to the GPU, while old textures are discarded and removed, which is a little bottlenecked in the viewers architecture. 

 

[Henri Beauchamp]

On 4/23/2023 at 11:56 AM, Kathrine Jansma said:

The stuttering is more likely a different issue

On systems which BIOS/UEFI lacks an ”Above 4G decoding” setting or the newer ”Resizable BAR” setting in their PCIe configuration, or with these disabled, you will also experience bad stuttering (pretty much second-long freezes) when the texture VRAM usage overshoots the 4GB limit... This can be easily reproduced by pushing the textures memory setting beyond 4GB in viewers allowing it (or turning on their VRAM usage auto-limiting setting, when they got one, such as in the latest FS release), and then standing in a textures-heavy sim with 256m draw distance, waiting for all textures in FOV to load, then rotating your avatar in place to face the opposite direction.

This is one of the reasons that made me add a bound GL texture limit setting in the Cool VL Viewer; it limits the said textures to 2.5GB by default, whatever the configured ”Texture memory” (being a soft limit, which the discard bias algorithm is using in excess of textures memory usage and CPU RAM usage, it must kick in before the phenomena would appear, and given other GL textures usage in the viewer, it usually appears around 3GB of GL bound textures).

With the recent changes brought to the viewers VRAM management and the newer graphics cards with 8+ GB of VRAM, this issue became rather prominent...

Edited April 24, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[Aishagain]

Well, I haven't the foggiest notion of the details of what you say @Henri Beauchamp, but that phenomenon does occur when texture VRAM use exceeds 4GB, and at a couple of dance clubs I can fill the texture memory with a 64m dd in less than 30 minutes.  Camming around then definitely provokes the long stutter/freeze effects.

Having said all that, what can I do about it? My GPU has 6GB VRAM and the dynamic texture memory setting of FS allows me to use 4GB, should I reduce that and if I did won't that promote texture thrashing?

Edited April 24, 2023 by Aishagain

[Henri Beauchamp]

14 hours ago, Aishagain said:

Well, I haven't the foggiest notion of the details of what you say @Henri Beauchamp, but that phenomenon does occur when texture VRAM use exceeds 4GB, and at a couple of dance clubs I can fill the texture memory with a 64m dd in less than 30 minutes.  Camming around then definitely provokes the long stutter/freeze effects.

Yes, this is exactly the same issue, and ”camming around” can also cause the same symptoms as those I described, since this is also a sudden change in the FOV, that may cause a temporary overshoot in 4GB mapped memory window limit. It might however also be due to an overshoot in the total VRAM usage (at which point, the driver has no other choice than spilling textures over to the CPU RAM, causing, here again, stutter and ”short” freezes).

14 hours ago, Aishagain said:

Having said all that, what can I do about it? My GPU has 6GB VRAM and the dynamic texture memory setting of FS allows me to use 4GB, should I reduce that and if I did won't that promote texture thrashing?

First and foremost, do check in your BIOS/UEFI for those ”Above 4G decoding” or ”Resizable BAR” settings: the first should be present in pretty much every BIOS/UEFI, even for old computers, while the first will only appear (and sometimes only once the first setting got checked) in newer UEFI versions (approximately one year old or less), and only when the CSM (BIOS compatibility mode) is disabled in the UEFI. Check your motherboard documentation for how to enter the BIOS/UEFI (usually typing F2 or DEL *just* after the keyboard is initialized on reboot; this might be tricky and require quick repeated key-presses on one of those keys), and where to find the said setting(s) (normally somewhere in PCI advanced settings).

If you have them checked and still experience the stuttering/freezes, you will need to disable Firestorm's ”Dynamic Texture Memory” setting (in ”Preferences” floater, ”Graphics” tab, ”Hardware Settings” sub-tab) and then use the ”Viewer Texture Memory Buffer” slider instead (keep it at the max 2048MB)...

Edited April 25, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[Aishagain]

@Henri Beauchamp

thanks, but your answer has two "firsts" and I am unclear as to which I am likely to have on my bios.

I assume the "above 4G decoding"?

My PC is over 3 years old so I assume it won't have the other setting.

The effect I am seeing almost certainly involves incidents of swapping into system RAM.

Disabling the dynamic texture memory setting results in quite a lot of texture thrashing but does eliminate the stutters and freezes ( I have tested it during making checks for the FS Jira, FIRE-32868, I raised) but I guess I'll just have to live with that.

Edited April 25, 2023 by Aishagain
additional info

[Henri Beauchamp]

1 minute ago, Aishagain said:

hanks, but your answer has two ”firsts” and I am unclear as to which I am likely to have on my bios.

I assume the ”above 4G decoding”?

Yes, the newer ”Resizable BAR” setting is just a ”better version” for newer PCIe bus and graphics cards versions...

3 minutes ago, Aishagain said:

My PC is over 3 years old so I assume it won't have the other setting.

No, it won't have it, unless your motherboard maker provides an updated UEFI version with it added... Worth checking on their web site.

4 minutes ago, Aishagain said:

Disabling the dynamic texture memory setting results in quite a lot of texture thrashing ( I have tested it during making checks for the FS Jira I raised) but I guess I'll just have to live with that.

Yes, this is the drawback... Lowering your draw distance would reduce the texture memory usage and thus the blurry textures.

Alternatively, give a shot at the Cool VL Viewer (I spent quite some time optimizing the code for the texture fetcher and discard bias algorithm, and you should not have to worry any more about freezes and stuttering).

[primerib1]

On 4/25/2023 at 8:53 PM, Henri Beauchamp said:

Alternatively, give a shot at the Cool VL Viewer (I spent quite some time optimizing the code for the texture fetcher and discard bias algorithm, and you should not have to worry any more about freezes and stuttering).

CVLV is hands down the winner of the performance crown 👍

Though it's quite jarring using V1 UI if one's too familiar with V6 UI 😆

That said, on my laptop, FS is so slow it's practically unusable. Any other TPV runs better. I keep going back-and-forth between Kokua & Alchemy; I fire up CVLV if I really need performance (e.g., visiting a heck-crowded region...)

 

[Nyayr]

old topic but the issue is caused by drivers of 23.3 or 23.4 and later for AMD (i got a RX 560), rolling back to 22.5 or 22.11 or such fixes it, as the issue is Vram bloats, drawn your ram then to the max and FS crashes, it is an AMD issue of how it handles OPENGL is my guess.

So unless you need to play the newer game rollback works, be sure to also roll back the window drivers if the andrenaline stops responding as windows just updates it else to a april version 2023.