Hi all, I was trying to play Doom: The Dark Ages on my Fedora system a while back, and the game kept crashing not long after booting up because it could not allocate enough GPU memory. That prompted me to look into what was using all that precious memory, and I noticed nearly all KDE frameworks enabled on my system allocate GPU memory, even if I do not use them actively, or if they have no window shown on screen at all.
Here is a screenshot of nvidia-smi I took just now illustrating that problem:
I should mention I disabled maalit-keyboard before taking that screenshot, as it had allocated 435MiB of GPU memory, even though I did not invoke it or launched any program that required the virtual keyboard.
I we tally up all allocated memory on my system, and remove the program I actively use directly or indirectly (so: kwin, Xwayland, plasmashell, xwaylandvideobridge, dolphin, wezterm, firefox, 1password) that’s over 234MiB of memory taken up for (apparently) no reason at all.
Why are all these programs allocating GPU memory ? While some of them might have a reason to, I do think baloorunner does not index the contents of my GPU in real-time… I also understand why they’d use a bit of memory if they had a window open (as Dolphin does) but that’s not even the case for most of them !
Given the recent events and the (purely fabricated) scarcity of RAM and VRAM these days, I do think it would be wise to only use it when absolutely necessary 