Many of the modern-day AAA games cannot be played at their maximum graphical settings on GPUs with 8GB VRAM. Thanks to a Valve developer, there’s now a way to improve the performance of GPUs limited by their VRAM.

8GB GPUs have a bad reputation

This reputation is deserved, but for the wrong reasons

GPUs that have 8GB VRAM are capable of running modern titles at ultra settings, but mostly end up at 1080p. When you bump that resolution to 1440p or above, the game, at max graphics settings, typically starts asking for more GPU memory than an 8GB graphics card may provide. This can lead to FPS drops and stuttering in the game.

However, there are also cases when the game requires affordable memory to run smoothly, but that memory is not accessible to the game on Windows and other operating systems. This is because of poor VRAM management of these operating systems, as they reserve a portion of VRAM for system operations.

This patch helps 8GB GPUs do more with less

Surprise! Optimization makes everything work better

Natalie Vock, a Valve developer, showed on their blog that up to a quarter of their 8GB VRAM was eaten up by other applications. When they ran Cyberpunk 2077 on top of the open applications, the GPU had to burrow some RAM from the system to keep the game running. However, this is where the FPS drops, and performance issues come from.

To fix this issue, the developer has created a kernel patch for Linux that effectively improves the performance by prioritizing the game and allocating more VRAM to it, instead of other applications in the background.

This is a positive step from Valve overall, as this optimization of operating system and game memory usage on Linux is extremely beneficial to 8GB GPUs. Given that Valve’s upcoming Steam Machine runs a Linux-based OS with a custom AMD 8GB GPU, this puts the Steam Machine in a better position to provide smooth gaming performance.

This kernel patch works for AMD and Intel Xe graphics cards, but unfortunately, not for Nvidia GPUs. The patch is available as an AUR for Arch Linux users, and you’ll also need a CachyOS kernel to run this patch.

Graphics RAM Size

12GB

Boost Clock Speed

2600MHz

Nvidia’s RTX 5070 graphics card is one of the more balanced options in the RTX 50-series lineup. It gives you 12GB of VRAM, which is much more future-proof than the 8GB VRAM lower-tier cards offer, while also offering more cores and higher bandwidth than the RTX 5060 Ti.