When showing RHI Stat the usage looks way too high. Thing is my Textures are mostly either 256/512/1024 and Materials are mostly no Texture but Solid Colors. I’m finding this very confusing.
I’ve noticed opening and closing open tabs has an impact so I guess the stats are not entirely the open Level/Viewport. Also, it does say “Reserved” mem buffer, does this mean available?
If you have a lot of hard references then try converting them to soft references and loading them when needed. It will reduce the memory footprint of assets loaded at the same time.
Hi, you could use the render resource viewer to get more information about what things use the vram (will show you the vram usage down to specific textures and meshes). Also keep in mind that if you have features like lumen and vsm enabled, those would also use up a lot of vram, so it’s not only the textures that are used in your own assets.
The render resource viewer shows all the usage of the editor though, so ideally you should restart the editor and directly load into the level you want to debug.
I did a little experiment with an Empty Level showing RHI stats and there is no change at all, so it’s not going to show specific level stats just overall engine use same as the Resource Viewer.
So for that level (its mostly empty) what uses up the most vram is nanite, virtual shadow maps, virtual textures (the landscape uses RuntimeVirtualTexture) and lumen. If I would need to reduce vram, that would mean to disable those features (e.g. disabling nanite should save those 576MB).
I’m not using Nanite or Virtual Textures but I am using Lumen.
Just found Nanite was ticked in the Project Settings and unticked it but now there is an error “Nanite is enabled but cannot render, because the project has Nanite disabled”. This error also shows in thumbnails for Materials.
If you don’t use nanite, then you could also check that the shadow map method is set to Shadow Maps (and not Virtual Shadow Maps). Not sure whether it automatically switches to Shadow Maps once nanite is disabled. That might also save some vram and improve performance. Its under Project Settings → Engine - Rendering → Shadows → Shadow Map Method.