Can someone please tell my why the fuck Windows would need 1.2 gigs of video memory? For fucks sake this is in a VM there's nothing on here but RDR2

Maybe Windows uses it to cache something, like it does with normal RAM?

@sbiewald still, why would that justify 1.2 gigs? Wouldn't machines with only a few gigs of ram choke to death in that case?

@Tayo You've heard of bloatware, right?

"Resources are cheap; optimizing is expensive."

Do you have multiple monitors or a high resolution screen? That memory might be for that was well

@FlamingServers the VM runs on a single 144hz 1440p monitor

Might be a silly question, but did you have your browser open? If you have the option enabled for it to use your GPU, that could be a possible explanation.

@Jilano there's nothing but Red Dead on the VM. If I want to use a browser I'll switch to the Linux host. To me it looked like Windows reserved the VRAM, but for what reason is beyond me.

It's not just windows you're running, though. Also Linux and the VM itself.

@Geoxion Linux runs on a different GPU, Windows and Linux are entirely isolated apart from shared CPU and memory

Edit: besides, the memory is reserved fully when the VM is ran, meaning any memory the VM might need for itself would come from the host, not the guest

It could be the Directx12 API within Windows. It needs RAM to communicate between your Game and the OS. And also the RAM allocated mustn't be equal to the RAM actually needed.

@dijon yeah would make sense, thing is, this is video memory, not system memory

@Jilano Oh, that's nuts. I had 1gb of vram usage, had firefox opened. after closing that shit, it went down to 600mb

@JhonDoe I recommend disabling the GPU option in the settings. By the way, it can go way higher if you have lots of streams and other videos opened.