[g697279063] Vulkan freaks out and video corrupts

[sinisterseed]

So, I was playing 4 Seasons of Doom today in Vulkan and all worked fine, until I reached a certain section of MAP01 where the game decided to freak out and I experienced massive framerate drops, which ultimately led to the video getting corrupted.

I initially thought it might've been due to the dynamic light sources, but there weren't anywhere near enough lights around for that to happen. The frame drops eventually stopped but after that, the video started getting corrupted and I had to restart the game to fix it anyway. It didn't look like it was going to crash, but the corruption was quite clearly not going to go away all by itself. After the restart I've no longer experienced issues, at least for the time being, but I can't even begin to guess what could have led to the problem in the first place.

This seems very similar to a corruption problem that was reported before, but I have no idea if it's the same or related.

I made an 8 minute long highlight of the whole thing here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/686255567
A screenshot can be found here, but the clip will probably be more useful: https://i.imgur.com/WLlHgqD.png

The wad is found here: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/level ... -u/seasons

[phantombeta]

I'm guessing you're running out of VRAM. The symptoms look remarkably similar to what happens when I run out of VRAM with the Vulkan backend.

[sinisterseed]

I'm guessing you're running out of VRAM. The symptoms look remarkably similar to what happens when I run out of VRAM with the Vulkan backend.

Yeah, that was my guess at first as well, but ultimately that's a Boom map and doesn't use any kind fancy textures and other stuff that could easily eat all my VRAM, nor am I using sprite rescaling or other graphical enhancements.

I just find it hard to believe I'm running out of memory considering the circumstances. I've played far more hardware intensive stuff and this never occurred.

[phantombeta]

Could be a VRAM leak. Or something else in the background already using a lot of VRAM. The lag also happens to me when I'm running out of VRAM, too, specially if I'm looking at a lot of decals.

I just got it again by messing around with Guncaster + Normal6x. One thing I found out this time is that the screen corruption disappears if I resize the window, and only the corruption in the sky cylinder and world remain there.
Random image:

I can see a tiny sliver of the sky texture here.

[sinisterseed]

Could be a VRAM leak. Or something else in the background already using a lot of VRAM. The lag also happens to me when I'm running out of VRAM, too, specially if I'm looking at a lot of decals.

I just got it again by messing around with Guncaster + Normal6x. One thing I found out this time is that the screen corruption disappears if I resize the window, and only the corruption in the sky cylinder and world remain there.

I can see a tiny sliver of the sky texture here.

Yeah, with Normal6x re-scaling and another mod, whereas I use none of that . The only app I had open in the background was OBS, but nothing else that could eat up my all my VRAM, or even RAM for that matter.

I figure this may be another leak, or the memory keeps going up with use and is never freed, it's just ridiculous if this turns out to be normal behavior, 2GB of VRAM is suddenly no longer enough for Doom classic lol.

[phantombeta]

2 GB sounds quite low - my own system uses about 1.7 GB with all my usual programs open. It wouldn't surprise me at all if that's why you ran into this.

[sinisterseed]

2 GB sounds quite low - my own system uses about 1.7 GB with all my usual programs open. It wouldn't surprise me at all if that's why you ran into this.

I'm not doing much GPU intensive stuff on my PC apart from streaming and playing some older games, but if I read it right there's barely much VRAM used for me unless I fire up one of these. Most of my activity tends to be CPU/RAM intensive.

Right now it sits at... not even half a gigabyte - 0.2/2.0GB according to Task manager. So if that's true, that ain't it. If it is, welp, I guess that's how long this PC hold up, three whole years and it's already time for an upgrade... how quaint.

[drfrag]

Actually 2 GB of dedicated video ram is a lot, i have one in my desktop and zero in my laptop. No problems with that map here with integrated video (AMD R2).

[dpJudas]

My two year old GPU:



I'd say 2 gigs is on the low end nowadays. According to steam's hardware survey 46% of today's gamers have 6 gigs or more. 27% has 2 gigs or less. Not entirely sure if that 27% includes iGPU's or not. For integrated GPUs the system memory is the GPU memory, which means they typically have 16 gigs of that.

[Rachael]

12 gigs here, for whatever it's worth. 6 year old GPU.

[drfrag]

I have 4 GB of system ram, that's why Far Cry 4 was barely playable.

[sinisterseed]

Ouch, god dang it folks, you're sure making me feel like the ultimate peasant now with your fancy hardware. Just one of the reasons I want to move to consoles, can't keep up with the tech...

Nonetheless, I agree, 2GB definitely gravitates towards the low end side of the spectrum nowadays, you still get away with it depending on what you're doing, but for "modern" gaming, other GPU intensive activities, and simply going beyond 1080p resolution it simply isn't enough anymore. But high end hardware is expensive, so I may be due for an upgrade, but that won't be for a few more years.

I'm waiting for DDR5 to enter mass production first, and I have decided to not invest into this machine any further due to some poor choices I made back when I got it, so I'll just build another when I'll have the possibility. With the COVID crisis around, my financial situation is already very difficult so that won't happen anytime soon.

[drfrag]

2 GB ought to be enough for anybody.

[sinisterseed]

Alright, so I continued playing this wad today, and I think I now have direct confirmation of GZDoom leaking memory.

I played MAP03 for a while, then checked how my memory usage was doing. GPU memory was sitting at 0.9/2.0GB and GZDoom's RAM usage was at 500mb. But later on, near the very end of the map, after roughly 2 hours of playing, it leaked memory massively again, and it was GZDoom 100%. Its memory consumption spiked from 500mb of RAM to 1.5GBs, and the GPU memory from 0.9 to 1.9/2.0GB. I had no other random programs open or sitting in the background to chew my memory, and OBS' resource consumption didn't change since I started playing at all.

So for some reason, the more you play, the worse GZDoom's resource usage gets, and ultimately ends up eating all my memory, not just all my VRAM but also a considerable chunk of my RAM. On a map such as MAP01 or MAP03 of this wad there is no logical explanation for why this occurs, this is not a hardware intensive wad by any means, and I've never experienced similar issues playing wads with GZDoom's Vulkan before. No way this behavior is normal.