I have an RX 9070 XT with 16GB of VRAM, but the Steam performance overlay showed around 20.5–21GB of VRAM being used. I first noticed it while playing Star Wars Outlaws at 1080p on medium settings, and I've also seen the issue in Space Marine 2 and Palworld. The games stutter, drop frames, and have inconsistent performance. Is the system borrowing regular RAM, or could this indicate a driver, monitoring, or hardware problem?
2 Answers
If the game needs more graphics memory than the card has, Windows can make some system RAM available to the GPU. That can make the reported total look higher than the card’s physical 16GB, but system RAM is much slower and can cause stuttering, frame-time spikes, and drops. At 1080p on medium settings, that amount of usage is unusual, so it’s worth checking whether the overlay is reporting allocated or shared memory rather than true VRAM usage.
The game and settings matter here. Heavy texture settings at high resolutions can fill VRAM, but 20GB being shown on a 16GB card usually means the monitor is combining dedicated VRAM with shared system memory or showing memory that has been reserved rather than actively used. Check the dedicated and shared GPU-memory readings separately in Task Manager or another hardware monitor, then clean-install the graphics driver and test with overlays disabled.
The issue was first noticed in Star Wars Outlaws at 1080p and medium settings, and I’m seeing similar stutters in Space Marine 2 and Palworld as well.