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Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

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Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#41

Post by christophilus »

toredash wrote: post #12
d3Xt3r wrote: post #11

Gosh, 7.2 literally just dropped with a bunch of awesome of performance/gaming related improvements (large folios, cache-aware scheduling, improved MGLRU reclaiming, Fair GPU Scheduler etc)... and I already can't wait for 7.3 to come out. Meanwhile in the Windows world, users hate updates... Like I genuinely can't think of a single instance that made users exclaim, "oh boy I just can't wait for the next Patch Tuesday…

Didn't we eagerly await on updates in the good old days of Windows?

I never did. I did wait eagerly for new .NET releases, though.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#42

Post by OsrsNeedsf2P »

nickjj wrote: post #36

This post focuses on performance, but what about crashing due to apps seeing no RAM available to allocate once VRAM is filled up? I remember having this problem when I used an NVIDIA 750 Ti with 2 GB of memory. Just opening a few Firefox or Ghostty terminals (both are GPU accelerated) would result in those apps crashing or not being able to render their contents. Sometimes the compositor would crash or become unstabl…

I gave myself 32GB of swap since SSDs are quite fast and the pages sent to disk seem to intelligently be rarely referenced ones. Feels amazing to run 4 VMs and 12 Claude Code instances on my mid tier hardware

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#43

Post by zozbot234 »

hypfer wrote: post #7

I'll be the one to ask the obvious question: What does this mean for compute workloads? Specifically, LLM inference. Does it mean anything at all, or is this purely a games-thing?

If you have model layers/experts that reside in CPU RAM, it's generally better to do that part of inference on the CPU than pay the cost of shipping them over to the GPU. LLM inference is generally bottlenecked by data-movement, not compute. There may be a limited exception for prefill or perhaps decode of very wide batches, where shuffling the data around may be justified.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#44

Post by alt227 »

d3Xt3r wrote: post #11

Gosh, 7.2 literally just dropped with a bunch of awesome of performance/gaming related improvements (large folios, cache-aware scheduling, improved MGLRU reclaiming, Fair GPU Scheduler etc)... and I already can't wait for 7.3 to come out. Meanwhile in the Windows world, users hate updates... Like I genuinely can't think of a single instance that made users exclaim, "oh boy I just can't wait for the next Patch Tuesday…

I personally am very excited for the upcoming Windows 11 update which will allow users to move the taskbar to any edge of their screen.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#46

Post by alt227 »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #28
toredash wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't we eagerly await on updates in the good old days of Windows?

....No. And those were not good days, unless your definition is fun is reinstalling OS

Back when updates were add on packs like Plus! they were very exciting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Plus!

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#47

Post by flaburgan »

nickjj wrote: post #36

This post focuses on performance, but what about crashing due to apps seeing no RAM available to allocate once VRAM is filled up? I remember having this problem when I used an NVIDIA 750 Ti with 2 GB of memory. Just opening a few Firefox or Ghostty terminals (both are GPU accelerated) would result in those apps crashing or not being able to render their contents. Sometimes the compositor would crash or become unstabl…

Your last sentence sums it all: AMD is the only serious option on Linux. Not perfect, but far better than Nvidia, thanks to their open drivers that anyone (and especially Valve) can improve.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#48

Post by alt227 »

toredash wrote: post #15
a012 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only Windows update that made me “eagerly await” is the Windows XP SP2.

And what an update it was. I still remember how Windows ME looked at first, the feeling of something better. That didn't last long

Being able to preview media files directly in the preview pane of explorer was mind blowing to me. This feature alone made me love ME, let alone the interface customisation it allowed.

Re: Linux 7.3 improves performance when running out of vRAM

#49

Post by nickjj »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #42
nickjj wrote: post #36

This post focuses on performance, but what about crashing due to apps seeing no RAM available to allocate once VRAM is filled up? I remember having this problem when I used an NVIDIA 750 Ti with 2 GB of memory. Just opening a few Firefox or Ghostty terminals (both are GPU accelerated) would result in those apps crashing or not being able to render their contents. Sometimes the compositor would crash or become unstabl…

I gave myself 32GB of swap since SSDs are quite fast and the pages sent to disk seem to intelligently be rarely referenced ones. Feels amazing to run 4 VMs and 12 Claude Code instances on my mid tier hardware

Swap doesn't help in this case.

It's GPU drivers freaking out when they run out of VRAM, but it might only be specific to NVIDIA cards since AMD seems to handle this better.

But, if it's driver specific that means it could be fixed at the kernel level I suppose, especially since Windows handles it seamlessly?

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