I’m trying to figure out exactly how much VRAM my game requires and I found a promising looking tool in the Unreal Engine that I think might give me some valuable insights: Using the stat startfile and stat stopfile console commands I can record profiling data for my game, which is saved into a .uestats file in its Saved directory and if I open this file in Unreal’s Session Frontend (Tools → Session Frontend) I can inspect a range of stats under the “VulkanMemory” and “VulkanMemoryRaw” stat categories:
At first I thought these stats are exactly what I was looking for, but at second glance I noticed that the VulkanMemory->Total stat, which looks like the largest of the bunch, tends to be much lower than the VRAM usage of my game as reported by nvidia-smi, a CLI tool that’s part of my graphics driver that I normally use to check the VRAM usage of my game.
So my question is: If these VulkanMemory stats don’t represent the actual amount of VRAM that my game allocates, what do they represent?