A half-year-old merge request from Igalia's Karmjit Mahil has been merged for Mesa 25.0 that is a Vulkan layer allowing for optionally limiting the amount of video memory reported to games/applications.

Primarily for testing/debugging purposes, the new "vram-report-limit" Vulkan layer allows for limiting the amount of video memory reported to an application. It doesn't enforce actual limits on the vRAM use but rather just the expressed amount of vRAM reported to be available. From there applications may alter their behavior based on seeing less vRAM than is actually there, but if they keep on allocating memory they can still go above the artificially limited cap.

Karmjit Mahil worked on this Vulkan layer for wanting to explore reductions in the vRAM limit and their impact on gaming performance. The layer allows via VK_VRAM_REPORT_LIMIT_HEAP_SIZE specifying a static size in MiB for all device heaps for a given Vulkan physical device.

Those interested in this Vulkan layer within Mesa 25.0 for debugging/testing purposes can find all the details within [1]this merge request .



[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/30095