AMD RADV driver will soon stop eating RAM with some games

Developer Mike Blumenkrantz has continued blogging about Linux graphics driver improvements, with a fix from developer Samuel Pitoiset landing to stop the AMD RADV (Vulkan) driver eating up RAM.

In a blog titled "Oom", Blumenkrantz mentioned how it was discovered that Dota 2 was using far too much RAM. Using massif-visualizer and GFXReconstruct, they noticed how Dota 2 was eating up 3GB of RAM "just from the driver" and "nearly all of it just from in-memory shader IR". Turns out this was caused in part by using the new Graphics Pipeline Library, ongoing work to make games smoother using the VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library extension.

Thanks to the effort, the issue was properly identified and a fix for the problem resulted in an "85% reduction in memory utilization" in Dota 2 that was being tested.

Since this could have potentially hit other games too, and with Graphics Pipeline Library hopefully going to be enabled by default in the next major release of the Mesa drivers, it's good to see.