Improved VRAM usage in Win 10 2004

In Win 10 1909, it appeared that ~20% of the VRAM on your video card was reserved for the OS. In 2004, it seems that the reserved VRAM is now a fixed 900 MB. An 11 GB card shows 10.1 available and an 8 GB card shows 7.1 available. Can anyone else confirm this, especially for cards VRAM<8GB and VRAM>11GB? nVidia Titan cards have always had the option available to change this amount of VRAM reserved by Windows 10, but GTX and RTX have not. I'm running Win 10 Pro 2004.

I'm unaware of any VRAM being reserved for the OS.

I learn something new every day. (Unfortunately, I forget two old things.)

How would I find that quantity? Don't see anything like that in the nVidia CP, or the Display Adapters control panel. GPU-Z doesn't show it, either.

My GT 730 shows 40.9MB of hardware reserved memory. It doesn't specify whether that is RAM or VRAM.

eLPuSHeR said:

My GT 730 shows 40.9MB of hardware reserved memory. It doesn't specify whether that is RAM or VRAM.

Where is that shown?

Task Manager -> Performance -> GPU tab

It also happens in AMD Ryzen laptops with Vega graphics, usually 2 GB reserved. This cannot be changed by the user.

eLPuSHeR said:

Task Manager -> Performance -> GPU tab

OK. It shows VRAM (8GB for my graphics card), and an amount utilized (varies with the number of browser windows open). It also shows system RAM mapping.

If any VRAM is being reserved for the OS, it's not obvious.

Here's what the Win 10 versions prior to 2004 did:

Windows 10 reserves 20% of GPU vram. Is there a way to fully use the vram other than installing linux/ubuntu? : buildapc

This made no sense to reserve a fixed 20% for the OS to use. If one had a nVidia Titan with 24 GB of VRAM, roughly 4.5 GB of VRAM was lost and the OS would really have to work at it to use that amount by itself. In fact, even with the OS now reserving ~1 GB of VRAM with version 2004, I'd be surprised if Win 10 ever comes close to that figure either.

BTW, the Win 10 Task Manager has some handy settings, if one is interested in this topic. Go to the performance tab, then GPU and click on the little 3D tab. You'll see all kinds of GPU-related items. It's possible to differentiate between 3D graphics stats and CUDA stats, among other things.

Just for fun, I Googled "Windows 10 reserved VRAM". All that came up was a few forum posts. The "experts" who tried to answer questions on the subject seemed to know nothing about it.

Is it that obscure? Maybe it's well known in the GPU computing community. Of which I am definitely not a member.