Question Regarding Raytracing on PC GPUs

Hey all, I have noticed a weird issue raytracing on the PC. For reference, I have a 3070 and a Ryzen 9 3900xt. What I notice is that for some, but not all, raytracing games the games tend to display what feels like a memory leak. For those that don't know, a memory leak is basically when a game doesn't efficiently clear VRAM periodically leading to the memory becoming too saturated and the game's framerate may plummet from, say, 60 FPS to 30-20 FPS or lower until eventually the game crashes. This usually happens over time, as the memory needs to become saturated first, and is fixed by restarting the game.

I first noticed with Cyberpunk, then RE 8, and now Dying Light 2 that when RT is on the games will run at 60 FPS until about an hour or so of play and then drop frames until eventually it's running in the 30-40 FPS range. Restarting the games fix the problem. But both Metro Exodus and Control didn't have this problem. So I though maybe these three games were simply unoptimized for RT. I mean, Dying Light 2 is still being worked on seemingly. But I don't hear people having issues with this specific problem. That it's only when RT is on as well makes me think there something about how RT is being handled that causes these problems.

Have any of you had a similar problem with RT in games or heard of others having this issue? I'm curious what is actually happening and if there's anything in my control to fix it. I mean, at the end of the day, restarting a game periodically is a nuisance but not the end of the world. But I am curious and if there were a fix I could implement I'd like to try it.

I found this on gog's forums. Could be a Win7 issue, GPU driver issue, I saw mention of a Nexus mod that might fix the issue (not sure the specific mod). GL!

If you open up Task Manager, click on the performance tab, and watch the "Dedicated GPU memory usage" bar while playing Cyberpunk, does it keep going up and up over time until it's almost full?

Also, what temperature does your GPU get up to? Your CPU or GPU might be throttling because it's getting too hot. RAM sticks might also be getting hot, but I don't think that's it.

And, of course, I gotta ask the eye-rollingly obvious basic stuff - is the game up to date, have you checked for driver updates, have you checked for Windows updates, and have you shut your computer down entirely and left it off for a few seconds anytime recently? Have you tried going into disk cleanup and cleaning everything out of there just to make sure it's not a temp file or something? This is just miscellaneous stuff but it's easy, doesn't take much time, and is worth trying.

How much RAM does your computer have? Is the game running out of dedicated memory and using a page file? That would be bad, but I don't know how to check that or what you could do to curb it. Does it only happen with raytracing enabled?

I haven't played any of these games with my 3080ti, I'll try later today and see if this happens. I might not come across it since I have 4GB more VRAM, so if someone around here has a 3070 and could try it that would be better.

Thanks for the tips guys. Actually wrote this post a little prematurely it seems. I did a little bit more research and found a solution. So for those that are having similar issues, I'd suggest turning off GPU scheduling. Here's how. Theoretically this is supposed to make for improve performance but it seems like, with ray tracing in particular, it has the opposite effect. I turned it off and haven't had an issue with Dying Light 2 all day today.

For reference on my whole system, here's what I'm running.

Windows 11

Gigabyte 3070 Vision OC

Ryzen 9 3900XT

32 GB of DDR4 at 3600 Mhz

The CPU runs at about 70 C at the highest and the GPU is around 65 C at the highest.