VRAM usage on laptops

[BOTOND]

The earth moon system runs on my laptop, but the full solar system doesn't load (even on lowest texture sizes) because my GPU (RTX 3050 4GB) only has 4 GB device local vram, and currently the game just refuses to use shared vram (I have 6GB of it), how far away is a patch to reduce the vram requirement or make the game be able to use shared vram in case the device local vram fills up instead of crashing? I believe either one would greatly benefit people with laptops or low vram gpus.

 

[Docent is playing! [YT]]

In general when a panel goes outside the screen [eg. 2nd screen] the game gets a VRAM leak reaching 21GB [11GB GPU+10GB Shared RAM] in my case
At that point OS gets crazy performance drop and even pushing KSA to the lowest process priority does not help.

EG.

 

[BraveCaperCat]

In general when a panel goes outside the screen [eg. 2nd screen] the game gets a VRAM leak reaching 21GB [11GB GPU+10GB Shared RAM] in my case
At that point OS gets crazy performance drop and even pushing KSA to the lowest process priority does not help.

EG.

How did you get KSA to even use shared VRAM? On launch, the game only seems to use dedicated VRAM, at least for me.

 

[Docent is playing! [YT]]

How did you get KSA to even use shared VRAM? On launch, the game only seems to use dedicated VRAM, at least for me.

I did nothing, I think it's the drivers fault
I can recreate it quickly by going directly to Luna [flyby] or landing than I'm getting the highest peak.
I have GTX 1080 TI OC with 11GB VRAM + 128GB DDR5 and half of it is shared VRAM.
After 2 min of gameplay I already passing from the stable 10GB after game loading into a memoryleak. Then that happens I have stable 30FPS, unless OS gets slowed down due to 3D bottleneck

 

[BOTOND]

I did nothing, I think it's the drivers fault

This is most definitely not an issue in the graphics drivers (I am on 2 weeks old drivers, and all other applications make use of the shared memory), but rather an issue with how the game allocates memory in vulkan. My theory is that it first tries to allocate memory from the heap that has the device local bit set and when it fails it just goes "I can't get more memory from this heap so I mush have ran out of memory, let's throw an exception". This is only my theory though.

 

[BOTOND]

I managed to load the whole solar system with a custom patch that I made (however this is very hacky and the performance isn't great)

 

[Docent is playing! [YT]]

I'm playing the max textures 16k with v2025.12.5.2976 on a full solar system, it starts with 10GB VRAM but after 30 min it explodes to double the size of it, probably due to Luna visit

 

[Kiwi Shark]

how far away is a patch to reduce the vram requirement

They could hit a performance buff in a week or two, or it could be months/years before they really optimize things to bring it down dramatically. It's very early right now and in my experience the performance varies every few versions. There are some tricks to boost performance but overall we just have to wait and see what happens.

 

[VITAS]

My guess is it sill be some time. It sureley has a lot of debug code in it too.