Natalie Vock, a graphics engineer working on Valve’s Linux graphics stack and the RADV Vulkan drivers team, has created a set of kernel patches and userspace tools to improve VRAM Prioritization in linux. These updates ensure that foreground games get priority access to the GPU’s fast local memory, while background apps are sent to slower system RAM.
Without this fix, Linux systems do not reliably treat a full-screen game as a higher priority than a browser tab or desktop process when VRAM fills. As memory pressure increases, game data can be flushed to the GTT, which is system RAM accessed by the GPU via PCIe. This slower access speed can cause frame-time issues and spikes, a problem that is especially common on 8GB graphics cards.
How the Linux VRAM Prioritization Solution Works
Vock’s solution integrates modifications to the Linux kernel for DRM device memory pool support and TTM memory management, along with two userspace utilities: dmemcg-booster and plasma-foreground-booster. The first manages memory control, while the second allows KDE Plasma to detect the active application in full screen and prioritize its VRAM usage. Non-KDE users can achieve similar results with newer versions of Gamescope.
In Vock’s testing with Cyberpunk 2077 on an 8GB GPU, the game initially used around 6GB of VRAM and shed 1.37GB in GTT. After applying the patches, VRAM usage increased to almost 7.4 GB and GTT excess decreased to 650 MB, which is a reduction of approximately 53%.
GPU Compatibility and How to Try VRAM Fix Now
The patches are aimed at AMD’s open Linux graphics stack. Some of the work also reportedly improves Intel Xe GPUs, and an upstream patch has been shipped for Nouveau, the open source driver for Nvidia graphics cards.
The easiest way to test the solution at this time is in CachyOS with KDE Plasmawhere the necessary kernel updates are being integrated starting with version 7.0rc7-2. These patches have not yet been included in major Linux distributions and it has not been confirmed whether they will be accepted in the upstream kernel.
