Aero memory usage leak?

[mojothehut]

Hey all.
So I've been noticing that after hours of game play, or switching games, that my idle dedicated video memory keeps climbing.

For example right now, after windows has been on for 5 days, GPU-Z shows my dedicated memory usage at 389mb. If I switch to windows basic (aero off) it drops to 30mb. I'll switch to that then back to Aero to sort of reset this weird memory hike that slowly climbs, seems to get higher after exiting a game.

Typically running Aero while idle, it only uses about 70-80mb vram. But again, after playing something like WoW or Metro2033 for a few hours, I notice -after closing- the game that the memory is back up over 150mbs used while idle.
Is this some sort of leak? Or it typical of Aero to start using that much memory after the computer has been on for days? I usually leave my computer on for a week or so at a time between reboots/total shut downs.

-Hardware:
AMD 975@4.0ghz on Sabertooth 990FX
Sapphire 7950 (950/1250)
Corsair DDR31600 16gb
Win7 Pro

 

[MontyAC]

Run a memory cleaner daily. I use this one:

http://www.pcwintech.com/cleanmem

 

[djsb]

The reported VRAM usage on AMD cards is just an inference by the monitoring program (Afterburner, etc). The card doesn't report it on its own, I don't think. So it's more than likely that the usage you're reading is counting what's been cached over the course of the system's uptime.

 

[Zxian]

Run a memory cleaner daily. I use this one:

http://www.pcwintech.com/cleanmem

Most memory cleaners are actually very bad for system performance. They allocate a lot of active pages in order to force data on the paged pool to be written to disk or cleared from cache. They cannot do anything about a memory leak in another program (aside from potentially forcing it to page to disk).

Cached memory is still a good thing. Unless you're actually experiencing reproducable out-of-memory errors due to the usage pattern you've seen (i.e. run a game on day one = fine, run same game on day five = bad), it's likely that nothing is wrong.

People really, really need to stop thinking they can outsmart or outmanage the memory management subsystem in Windows. It's there, it works, and most of the stuff you do is actually just making things worse.

 

[mojothehut]

Hmm okay.
Well I guess it's not really an issue, regardless of how it reads. I have 3gb of vram anyway, whats 300-400mb? lol

Thanks for the info