this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Steam Deck
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My understanding on the advantage for the VRAM change is that RAM gets priority over VRAM. If the systems needs more RAM, it will allocate the VRAM to RAM, and then reallocate back to VRAM, over and over. Increasing the minimum VRAM both keeps the VRAM from dropping below 4GB during high RAM demand and reduces the system swapping RAM between VRAM and RAM. That swapping back and forth can cause stuttering, which is the main thing the VRAM change is trying to fix.
I don't fault your logic, but unfortunately (and I really do mean unfortunately) that's not the case. The CPU gets absolute priority and can quickly take memory for itself.
Perhaps on other APU architectures that's not the case, I wouldn't know, but with the Steam Deck the CPU is always the maximum priority for memory allocation.
@kadu @Fubarberry FWIW the author of cryoutilities has done benchmarks and figured that increasing the default on the Deck does improve performance in some games slightly. He claims that introducing the swapfile also mitigates any potential disadvantages.
He did publish benchmarks, and he did isolate the VRAM change in at least one video I'm aware of... But he only showed very few games, with an improvement that's measured as less than 5% which is well within the margin of error.
Another YouTuber tried a round of CryoUtilities + 4GBs on over 20 games, and while he did get a 10% improvement in some (and we can't know which settings actually mattered as all of them were enabled) he also got a 10% decrease in others.
The point is though, none of this actually matters - because this setting can't possibly impact performance. It wasn't designed for this purpose, and the changes it does make can't affect how the APU will actually allocate memory. Do note that I'm talking about the 4GBs of VRAM thing though, messing with the swap file size and other similar things can indeed have a positive or negative impact on performance.
If you watch Cryo's specific game videos, he usually does a specific isolated 4GB VRAM tweak in every game. Often it does nothing, but sometimes it has a minor fps improvement or reduces stutter.
I've also seen other YouTubers run a list of games through cryoutilities (whole suite of changes, not just the VRAM tweak), and it definitely helps more than it hurts. Not huge gains, but it's free and relatively easy to do. Outside of a few games like RDR2 that have serious drawbacks it's usually worth it imo.