Weird behavior of Firestorm in terms of VRAM Usage on newer AMD Graphic drivers.

[Feuerblau]

Someone else experiences that behavior:

At some Moment Firestorm takes 14.5GB of dedicated VRAM of 16 my Card can provide. The Viewer starts to respond slowly when it happens. 
From one Moment to the other.
Will try another Graphics driver (i bet it's the issue because i updated it recently and it may fall to the same date).
Very odd. A restart solves the problem. It does happen when specific textures get loaded it seems, what textures i can't tell so far.

Graphics card is an AMD RX 6900XT.
I know that AMD fixed their OpenGL performance issue. So i guess it's something around that topic.

[Kathrine Jansma]

You could disable "dynamic memory" settings in the viewer and just assign a fixed amount. 

AMD "fixed" some function that reports free memory, but that sometimes reports a lot more VRAM than is actually available.

[Feuerblau]

3 minutes ago, Kathrine Jansma said:

You could disable "dynamic memory" settings in the viewer and just assign a fixed amount. 

AMD "fixed" some function that reports free memory, but that sometimes reports a lot more VRAM than is actually available.

Well, normally Firestorm as thread uses ~10GB of dedicated VRAM. 
It doesn't hit the 16GB border of my GPU though, when it starts to slow down.
Will test another driver. The one before the actual had not that issue.
 

[gwynchisholm]

I can hit 11-12gb of usage in firestorm with shadow detail set to max in 4k with my intel A770. That number isn’t too out of line if you’re doing something similar.

Though a general slowdown related to that memory usage may be an indicator of other problems related to memory allocation.

[Feuerblau]

Well, either the AMD Driver is borked (again) or something weird is going on.
When visiting crowded areas the performance tanks and won't go back to normal. It stays bad, worse at it should be.
I capped the performance to 60FPS without VSync (that cuts the performance in half, as it seems Firestorm uses standard VSync that cuts to 30FPS if it runs lower than 60FPS.)

When i visit said places, the performance at my home (normally said 60FPS, or ~220 without cap) will go down to ~20FPS.
That is weird.
I tried three driver versions now and the problem still persists.
When i log out and back in, performance is back to normal.
It happens sporadically out of nowhere and seems to happen when certain graphical stuff is loading.

 

Edit: 

Seems for some reason my GPU goes into a sort of hybernate mode. 
The GPU clock goes down to ~500MHz. Way to low, so the performance goes downhill of course. 
Weird behavior.
Normally the GPU runs around ~2000MHz in SL with dips lower to 600ish. But now it doesn't go up again when it drops for some reason.
Testing now an older driver version. 
 

Edited June 19, 2023 by Feuerblau

[Nyayr]

Maybe an old thread but the last firestorm this got worse, as before as normally my graphics would space out and now they crash, sims with a lot of bloodm, sparkles and avis do it faster.

The issue as far I see is some AMD cards the VRAM is 100% and over used and it starts draining your regular RAM to for me 12gb of my 16 till FS freezes (older FS it'd be spacing out).

As far I can tell rolling back to 22.11 or earlier drivers fixes the issue... the newer 23.XX since late last year are the culprit with many openGL games (fs included).

 

Edited September 26, 2023 by Nyayr
new tests.