Improving Xbox mode/FSE by stripping down HW acceleration from DWM like in the Win10 days?
Hello.
As we all know, the situation on the hardware market isn't great.
I run an RTX3080, with my current setup DWM alone eats up ~750MBs of VRAM on my GPU, and with other background apps the usage ends up at ~1.1GBs, that's over 10% of my VRAM gone just for the desktop that I don't even use while gaming.
Yes, I am running a 4K@144Hz screen with HDR at 10-bit. However, even at 1080p@144Hz at 8-bit, I didn't see the DWM drop much below ~400MBs, which is not inconsequential on machines with lower VRAM stacks of 8 or even 6GBs.
And that's on a "good day", right now as I was typing this with Firefox open the DWM process ~950MBs, almost hogging those 10% alone by itself, as is evident on the image attached.
I think it would be amazing if MS could make an option for the compositor to not use HW acceleration in Xbox/FSE mode to alleviate that VRAM burden.
I don't know how feasible it is, I know that DWM DXGI flip compositor is a built-in feature of Windows 11 and IIRC is part of the kernel itself. But I also know that Win10 had an option to disable DXGI Flip and DWM entirely.
Maybe a large feature update could implement this. In any case, what do you guys think, would you like such a feature, would you appreciate VRAM savings or is this completely irrelevant to you?
Edit: I'm not turning on telemetry in Windows so I can't formally submit the feedback, however perhaps discussion here will spark someone to do it themselves. Or not. I dunno.