nVidia GTX 460 memory problem? And a potential fix?

[Jace11]

Maybe not a typical memory leak, but a gfx memory problem.

I have a gtx 460, there are several versions, mine has 768MB onboard RAM. I have had issues since install. Scrolling around a battle is not smooth, and after a few battles, units lose all colour and appear white. On the campaign map, the same can happen to units, as well as water losing detail etc.. shadows disappearing, ground textures becoming more basic and models becoming simpler. All these problems are hastened by Alt-tabbing out and returning to shogun2, but primarily this is time dependent... the longer I play the more of these occur - hence my theory of mem leak.

In "Username"/AppData/Roaming/TheCreativeAssembly/Shogun2/logs I noticed a file gfx.log that would fill up over time containing comments like:

Downgrading, Over budget by 181 MB
Downgraded Shadows to 3
Downgraded Texture Quality to 2

etc

This looked to me like the gfx memory allocation is wrong. I just updated my nVidia drivers to 270.61 and tried another fix. I wondered if the game was not recognizing my card correctly, perhaps thinking it had 1GB of gfx memory, thus constantly running out the longer I played...

I found in boot.pack an fx folder which contains graphics card recognition and detail settings.
;
; Match device's description to a substring
; Items with two Hex numbers are <VendorID>,<DeviceID> pairs, and we match on these two, description is ignored (Hex digits must be lower-case)
;
; Quality = [LOW,MEDIUM,HIGH,ULTRA]
;
; Followed by one or more optional Custom Settings, one per line, legal values are:
;
; CustomSetting SHADER_MODEL=[3_LQ,3_0,4_0,4_1,5_0]
; CustomSetting TEXTURE_QUALITY=[LOW,MEDIUM,HIGH,ULTRA]
; CustomSetting ANTI_ALIASING=[OFF,2X,4X,8X,16X]
; CustomSetting TEXTURE_FILTERING=[TRILINEAR,ANISOTROPIC_2X,ANISOTROPIC_4X,ANISOTROPIC_8X,ANISOTROPIC_16X]
; CustomSetting HDR=[TRUE,FALSE]
; CustomSetting SSAO=[TRUE,FALSE]
; CustomSetting DEPTH_OF_FIELD=[TRUE,FALSE]
; CustomSetting DISTORTION=[TRUE,FALSE]
; CustomSetting HARDWARE_SHADOWS=[TRUE,FALSE]
; CustomSetting UNIT_QUALITY=[LOW,MEDIUM,HIGH,ULTRA]
; CustomSetting UNIT_SCALE=[LOW,MEDIUM,HIGH,ULTRA]
; CustomSetting SHIP_QUALITY=[LOW,MEDIUM,HIGH,ULTRA]
; CustomSetting BUILDING_QUALITY=[LOW,MEDIUM,HIGH,ULTRA]
; CustomSetting SHADOW_QUALITY=[OFF,LOW,MEDIUM,HIGH,ULTRA]
; CustomSetting TREE_QUALITY=[LOW,MEDIUM,HIGH,ULTRA]
; CustomSetting GRASS_QUALITY=[OFF,LOW,MEDIUM,HIGH,ULTRA]
; CustomSetting WATER_QUALITY=[LOW,MEDIUM,HIGH,ULTRA]
; CustomSetting SKY_QUALITY=[LOW,MEDIUM,HIGH,ULTRA]
; CustomSetting EFFECT_QUALITY=[LOW,MEDIUM,HIGH,ULTRA]
; CustomSetting TERRAIN_QUALITY=[LOW,HIGH]
; CustomSetting FULLSCREEN=[TRUE,FALSE]
; CustomSetting VSYNC=[TRUE,FALSE]
; CustomSetting VIGNETTE=[TRUE,FALSE]
; CustomSetting VIDEO_MEMORY=[<bytes>]
;
;
; DirectX 11 GPUs
;
Quality=ULTRA
;
GeForce GTX 480
GeForce GTX 460
CustomSetting VIDEO_MEMORY=[<805306368>]
;
; DirectX 10 GPUs
;
Quality=ULTRA
;
Radeon HD 4800
GeForce 9800
GeForce GTX 295
GeForce GTX 260
GeForce GTX 280
GeForce GTX 285
GeForce GTX 275
;

I added the lines in red and made a new .pack file and wow, things seem alot better, but i need to play constantly for a while to check the fix. It may just be the new drivers as I changed both them and the gfx ID/mem limits at the same time but something was definately wrong before and it appears to be gone now. I'll post after I've tested more, but FPS and scrolling are way better now. My card wasn't even in the list, which strikes me as odd as it isn't exactly new.

[-iceblade^]

Hmmm. I have a 460 as well, but a hawk with 1gig. I cant say I've noticed any memory leaks or anything else. My guess is try dropping memory intensive stuff like reducing textures, unit sizes, and likely unit detail. etc.

[Jace11]

Oh I tried reducing settings, that didn't work, it still happened. It runs on ultra fine for maybe 30 mins to an hour... FPS is good. I'm glad you have no probs. 1GB maybe a default setting for high end cards or something.

[sdjenkyn]

Oh I tried reducing settings, that didn't work, it still happened. It runs on ultra fine for maybe 30 mins to an hour... FPS is good. I'm glad you have no probs. 1GB maybe a default setting for high end cards or something.

What resolution are you playing at? The higher the res the higher the memory burden.....just down scaling your res will allow you to continue playing at ultra in some cases.

[PoleCat]

What resolution are you playing at? The higher the res the higher the memory burden.....just down scaling your res will allow you to continue playing at ultra in some cases.

True enough. But from the nature of his post it looks like he manually set the video memory in the game boot so that the game would recognize the memory limit and scale correctly.

@Jace11 - I'd really like to know if this worked out for you. It definitely points to a problem with CA not fully up to date on all cards. I know that it's a pain to reconcile all possible cards into one game considering the sheer number out there. Thanks and good luck!

[-iceblade^]

Oh I tried reducing settings, that didn't work, it still happened. It runs on ultra fine for maybe 30 mins to an hour... FPS is good. I'm glad you have no probs. 1GB maybe a default setting for high end cards or something.

Are you sure it's a memory leak? Tried measuring usage with afterburner / precision / rivatuner?

[Phil-12-12]

Try posting here:

http://www.evga.com/forums/

[abram730]

I have this problem too.. GTX 470 1280 MB

Downgrading, Over budget by 135 MB
Downgraded Anti-Aliasing to 2
Downgraded Anti-Aliasing to 1
Downgraded Anti-Aliasing to 0
Disabled Depth of Field

Other report it on 2GB cards.

[Blom89]

768MB isn't really a lot of VRAM these days. I would even consider 1GB to be the bare minimum.

[abram730]

I have a feeling 20GB of video ram wouldn't be enough for this game.. cough memory leak.. cough cough.

[The King in the North]

I have a GTX 460 SOC, 1 gigabyte. I have also had some trouble with that card. Shogun inevitably crashes after playing for a few hours. Shuting down the game and starting it again however makes everything okay again.
I must ask since there seems to be a few 460 users here, anyone experienced Blue screens since getting the card?