Windows 11 VRAM Abuse
under review
Niri Neon
Tested on Official Viewer 2025.08 – 7.2.3.19375695301 and on Firestorm 7.2.2 (79439).
To reproduce; go to any area that would max out your VRAM.
As it currently stands, Windows is not stopping the viewer from using up ALL VRAM, including VRAM that's already in use by the OS or other applications. This causes the computer to slow down entirely, to a point of crashing to desktop, or sometimes even reaching BSOD. I can't imagine it's good for the hardware itself either.
In Firestorm, we can limit the VRAM the viewer can access, and this entirely removes the problem (when set to a reasonable amount so the system has some space, in my case from 24gb of VRAM to 16gb of VRAM, while the OS sucked up anywhere between 4 and 8.
I don't think this is a viewer issue, but a change in how Windows 11 deals with VRAM, however, the results are detrimental to the user experience.
Log In
Beatrice Voxel
Niri Neon Can you post some region SLURL's for where this occurs? Also how are you measuring VRAM usage per process? I've AIDA64 running a small 'dashboard' on a second monitor, and can set up a VRAM dash fairly easily with it, as long as there's sensors available to flag each process's usage.
Jellyfish
Hey Niri!
I just tried running on a 24gb vram machine and it also didn't seem to exhibit issues.
Can you tell us how your friend was getting vram usage (IIRC you said it was your friend)?
Also another thought; do you run the viewer with anything in the background possibly? Just trying to figure out how we might be able to reproduce this so it can be fixed for you.
Dan Linden
marked this post as
under review