Cool VL Viewer forum

Hi Henri,

i recently had the need to run the viewer on a Lenovo T14 laptop with a APU (AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650U e.g. a Vega 6 GPU part).
This obviously produces crappy results compared to a desktop with dedicated GPU, but even then it was extra annoying due to the RAM usage by default.

The default (probably due to the GL_ATI_meminfo strange results for such boxes) VRAM use led to constant texture flickering.
I even sometimes saw glitches that turned textures and UI parts black (always great to have black text on black background in the text entry box).
Once i manually set a fixed VRAM amount (e.g. just 2GB for my 48 GB RAM machine) the quality of life increased hugely.

Would it be a useful option to have a bit higher VRAM defaults for crappy iGPUs/APUs on machines with enough RAM before the dynamic handling kicks in?

There is, sadly, no "one fits all" solution... Between dGPUs with proper OpenGL VRAM reports (NVIDIA's under Linux and Windows, AMD with Mesa drivers under Linux), dGPUs with bogus such reports (AMD under Windows), and iGPUs/APUs without any VRAM and totally silly "VRAM" reports (AMD/Intel), there is simply no reliable way for the viewer to guess which is right...

You currently have two ways to override the bogus VRAM reports by OpenGL drivers: either set the LL_VRAM_MB environment variable (and yes, it should also work under Windows) or the "VRAMOverride" debug setting to whatever amount (counted in MB) is suitable for your system (*)... On such systems, disabling the "VRAM checks" in the Graphics preferences may also help.

This said, if you got a better algorithm than the one implemented, please be my guest and contribute it !

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(*) I will expose this setting as a spinner, for next release, in the Graphics settings: at least, this way, it will be easier for people to fix VRAM-related issues...

Done in v1.30.2.27 and v1.31.0.5.