Just wish it was coming from a non-commercial entity. Puts a sour note on the status of Linux gaming that a for-profit entity is the only one out there making meaningful progress.

patches to the Linux kernel and KDE

I think currently it might only work for AMD, but I think Nvidia could take advantage of it without too much work

RADV is driver for AMD. So I assume it is for AMD cards only.

She answered that in her blog post that the Phoronix article links to:

Which GPUs does this work with? Is it only AMD GPUs?

Whether or not your GPU can benefit from it depends on the kernel driver - more specifically, whether it sets up the dmem cgroup controller.

amdgpu and xe both have support for the dmem cgroup controller already. In theory, Intel GPUs running the xe kernel driver should benefit as well, although I’m not sure anyone tested this yet.

For nouveau, I have sent a patch for dmem cgroup support to the mailing lists. This patch is also included in my development branch, so if you use my AUR package it should work. In other cases, you will need to wait for the patch to be picked up by your distribution, or apply it yourself.

The proprietary NVIDIA kernel modules do not support dmem cgroups yet, so this won’t work there.

I think RADV Vulkan means its for AMD, not Nvidia. Nvidia has their own set of drivers. Unless I am misunderstanding here something.

Same card, same hopes.

It's on the AUR but you need a patched kernel which you can grab from catchyOS

Instructions are in the developer's blog post: https://pixelcluster.github.io/VRAM-Mgmt-fixed/

Q: I use another Arch-based distro! What now?

The dmemcg-booster and plasma-foreground-booster utilities are available in the AUR as well (plasma-foreground-booster carries the package name plasma-foreground-booster-dmemcg), so you can install them from there.

For the kernel side, you can either use the CachyOS kernel package on a non-CachyOS system by retrieving the package from their repository, or you can compile your own kernel. Installing linux-dmemcg from the AUR will compile the development branch I used to develop this. Being a development branch, this carries the risk of some stuff being broken, so install at your own risk!

If you want to apply the kernel patches yourself, you need these six .patch files: [links in blog]

I’m not sure how easily they apply on specific kernel versions, but feel free to leave a comment if you run into issues and I’ll try to help out.

to be fair, budget 8gb gpus have been a thing since the RX 480 (2016). if somone has less nowadays, id reckon its refusal to buy used, or refusal to buy something thats not nvidias sub 200$ market.

while yes, there of course are poorer regions. but even regions like brazil who have a ridiculous import tax on tech, still regularly stock the rx 580 as a "budget" gpu option.

if you go low enough, the user might as well have an igpu, which does not have the same vram limitations discrete cards have.

Be mad at the manufacturers who royally ripped you off with overpriced e-waste that only had 4GB, 6GB, or 8GB VRAM, instead of getting mad at those who are acknowledging reality honestly. None of these 8GB cards have been worth buying for at least 5 years. 6GB was top tier 11 years ago. It is 2026.

I absolutely love the replies by people demonstrating the very privilege you're talking about. It's almost like you set a trap and they just keep walking into it.

KDE Plasma default wallpaper

Are you sure? Nothing in the dev's blog post alludes to that, aside from being tested on AMD.