• Welcome to TechPowerUp Forums, Guest! Please check out our forum guidelines for info related to our community.
  • The forums have been upgraded with support for dark mode. By default it will follow the setting on your system/browser. You may override it by scrolling to the end of the page and clicking the gears icon.

Is GPU-Z displaying my memory usage correctly?

Joined
May 30, 2007
Messages
9,019 (1.37/day)
System Name Black Panther
Processor i9 9900k
Motherboard Gigabyte Z390 AORUS PRO Wifi 1.0
Cooling NZXT Kraken X72 360mm
Memory 2 x 8GB Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro DDR4 3600Mhz
Video Card(s) Palit RTX2080 Ti Dual 11GB DDR6
Storage Samsung EVO 970 500GB SSD M.2 & 2TB Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm
Display(s) 32'' Gigabyte G32QC 2560x1440 165Hz
Case NZXT H710i Black
Audio Device(s) Razer Electra V2 & Z5500 Speakers
Power Supply Seasonic Focus GX-850 Gold 80+
Mouse Some Corsair lost the box forgot the model
Keyboard Motospeed
Software Windows 10
I measured my in-game memory usage trying both ver. 0.5.5 and ver. 0.5.7

While running Skyrim, my Dedicated memory usage is 1742MB and my Dynamic memory usage is 108MB.

Now,

  • Memory Usage (Dedicated): graphics memory pages occupying the GPU's memory (memory on the graphics card)
  • Memory Usage (Dynamic): graphics memory pages occupying the system memory

How can the game be occupying 1742MB of my graphic memory if my 5970 only has 1024MB of memory usable? :confused:
 
i think dynamic stands for both, dedicated and system combined.
thats what i know.
 
please check your vram usage using process monitor and report back. it uses the reference implementation for this
 
I need some time to figure out how to do it..


:o

____________________


Is it this what you need?

Untitled.png
 
Last edited:
no, there is an option for gpu memory monitoring
 
does it not overspill in to main system memory? when i go on the websites checking for game compatibility i get told my aged 9600gt has 2.7gb of video memory when its only got 512mb
 
Yeah I have seen similar things and was wondering about this myself. It can and does use System memory but I would expect a much larger performance hit than I am seeing and also I think GPU-Z displays that separately but could be mistaken.
 
does it not overspill in to main system memory? when i go on the websites checking for game compatibility i get told my aged 9600gt has 2.7gb of video memory when its only got 512mb

yeah that happens when you ask directx or windows "how much memory on the vga card". some shitty software uses that method

but gpuz's philosophy is to only work with device memory when possible, because thats what people expect to see
 
yeah that happens when you ask directx or windows "how much memory on the vga card". some shitty software uses that method

but gpuz's philosophy is to only work with device memory when possible, because thats what people expect to see

awrighty cool thanks :) was the online "can you run it" sites sorta thing telling me that lol
 
I'm guessing this is the graph you want?

Untitled703.png


The last tab reads "GPU" if I'm seeing it correctly..

I'm googling away but still haven't figured out how to get it though :( sorry W1zzard I am far less savvy than you :o
 
not gpu load. there is some kind of gpu memory readout, even per process
 
Sorry I'm totally lost now.

When I start the game a whole lot of processes start, the image below only shows a small bit.

Right-clicking I see no option for anything GPU-related.
I don't know on which one I should be choosing.

Neither did I see anything GPU-related in the File, Edit, Event etc... tabs at the top :(

Untitled507.png
 
ugh sorry i meant system monitor not process monitor
 
ugh sorry i meant system monitor not process monitor

I'd appreciate a link to download the correct utility, please :)

(Though that process monitor is really interesting, I'm not sorry for having downloaded it and learnt a bit how it works).
 
GPU-Z agrees with System Monitor. Here it says I'm using 1.7GB of memory:

Untitled800.png


But as I said in my OP, how can the game be occupying 1.7GB of my graphic memory if my 5970 only has 1024MB of memory usable?

Untitled677.png


So neither System Monitor nor GPU-Z here are showing the actual memory being used from the VGA device..
 
interesting. must be some windows bug then. not much i can do, that memory monitoring is part of windows device model and there is no documentation for it
 
interesting. must be some windows bug then. not much i can do, that memory monitoring is part of windows device model and there is no documentation for it

Yeah, it's wrong, on most ATI cards I have tested so far, from 2900XT and up. It's intereting to note that no matter the framebuffer size, readings seem and average 768MB too high, as My 6950 2GB cards read as about ~2800MB or so, and 1 GB cards appear as BlackPanther's do, but I'm not sure on 2-4 series GPUs.

I wonder, if you have time with 7970 and BF3, if you can check memory usage and see if it says ~3900MB. It might be reading VRAM + GART allocation per output on some cards, or some strange thing.
 
Damn. I was hoping there was a different and better answer than just "it's wrong". Though if we can, in fact, determine that it's always 768 or whatever above that's better than nothing.

Between this and AO in Skyrim nVidia is looking better and better to me.
 
figure out whats wrong with it. i can easily subtract 768 mb from the readings
 
My 1GB 6950s in CFX shows like 17xx when running BF3 in ultra setting at 1080p
 
The 5970 has 2 GPUs, each with 1024MB memory - the GPU-Z information tab is only showing information on a single GPU. :)
 
Last edited:
The 5970 has 2 GPUs, each with 1024MB memory - the GPU-Z information tab is only showing information on a single GPU. :)

In crossfire only one set of memory is active.
The 5970 has 2 GPU's and 2048MB vram, (1024 per GPU) but only one x 1024MB is utilized during gaming.
 
Back
Top