VRAM Memory Leak Still Not Fixed

Going to hop on this bandwagon and note this is STILL not fixed. Lightroom CC will quickly max out 12GB of VRAM on a 3080ti doing... almost nothing... and then I've got stuttering window animations just moving files around.

I had a similar experience where I'd use 18/24 GB of VRAM on my card, and other programs like Photoshop would give warning about insufficient VRAM. DxO's raw demosaic tool, which heavily uses GPU features to process images, would go from processing them in a few seconds, to taking up to a minute when VRAM usage is high, likely because of swapping data in and out.

I'm running on a 7700k with a RTX 3090, with 32gb of system ram, and NVME/SSD disk.

Same issue: Lightroom uses almost all VRAM and causes Photoshop GUI to lag. For instance opening a new document, the new document initialy shows a part of a previously opened photograph, and zooming is slow. Or starting a filter (NIK) is also very slow - Photoshop even briefly shows status 'Not responding' in the process list - etc. It starts when switching to the Developer module in Lightoom.

During the last 1,5 years I kept my nvidia drivers up to date (use the Studio driver) and this issue also occurred with my previous GPU. If I close Lightroom the issue goes away and I can see Photoshop start to use more VRAM, especially when starting a filter like NIK. I'm keeping my Win 10 up to date, run one 4K screen (@10 bit and 98Hz), have a reasonable fast cpu (AMD 5950X) and there are no page-outs, event viewer errors or other suspicious messages. 

Would be nice if Lightroom had a 'Let Photoshop Use: xxxx MB (xx%)'-like setting to cap VRAM usage. I'm all for maximizing hardware usage, but not when it starts to impact performance of other programs, in this case Adobe's own Photoshop.

Also, using 22GB of VRAM seems rather unnecessary - Lightroom wasn't noticably different with my previous 8GB GPU (of which Lightroom used about 7GB, of course). 

Win 10, I7 8700K, GTX 970 4GB VRAM, 64GB RAM

Start LrC V9.4, develop module VRAM at about 1.5GB VRAM in use

Start Premier Pro 2020, import video and move to editing panel, start play - VRAM goes up to a little over 2GB.

Start export in PP - Adobe Media Encoder starts VRAM goes up to about 3GB

Go back to LrC V 9.4, develop about 6  images - VRAM usage goes up to 3.6GB. Upon completion of develop activity, VRAM usage goes down to 3.0GB

On completion of AME encoding and PP playback, VRAM stays at 3GB.

The Still images are DJI P3P Drone 12MP and the video is DJI 4K video.

Really wonder why some peeople have this issue and others don't. I constantly run Premiere at the same time as Classic and never seen any issues like described here. Much less beefy GPU with only 4GB of VRAM. Main machine is a 2018 MBP with a Radeon Pro 560X 4 GB GPU. I basically never quit Classic. It stays running for weeks usually only interrrupted upon needing to update OS or Classic itself.

I just started having this problem when getting a new PC.  I had problems working in Premiere Pro for video editing because my PC could not handle the work load so I upgraded.  I went from a GTX 970 to an RTX 2070 Super 8GB.  Premiere Pro is a dream now, but Lightroom was running terribly.  It ran perfectly fine for me on my older, much slower system.  I noticed that my VRAM usage was nearly maxed out as soon as I enter the Develop Module and if not immediately, after a single 1:1 zoom it will be at 95% usage and stay that high without ever dropping.  This means that even trying to watch a YouTube video on my second screen while editing causes problems.  The video will start dropping frames or freezing for short intervals.  This is the exact same screen setup I had with my old PC.  I only switched the PC itself, all my other hardware is the same.  This is definitely an issue, maybe not a "bug" if they intend it to use all of your VRAM, but what if you want to do more than just use Lightroom on your PC at one time.  I like to watch YouTube while I get my work done.

I can run current games that are quite strenuous to run on my 4k monitor on ultra settings and have YouTube videos playing on my second screen at the same time and my system still runs better than with Lightroom open sitting idle.  I am quite familiar with computers and computer hardware and I have been building PCs for a long time.  I can assure you this is not user error.  I do not have this problem with any other piece of software.  

My proposed suggestion to Adobe would be to allow us to choose how much VRAM is allocated to Lightroom like we can choose our cache size.  Maybe the same for RAM for users having problems with their RAM being used up.  You can already restrict CPU usage through Task Manager in Windows 10 by limiting the number of cores Lightroom can use.

I did find that changing my graphics acceleration to "Use only for display" solves this issue if you want a bandaid for the short term.  It is a shame that I am stuck choosing between not using the GPU for image processing at all or not doing anything else GPU related on my PC at the same time.  Somewhere inbetween would be great.

Here are my scpecs in case anyone is curious (I should have no performance issues with this build, and it definitely should not be running slower than my on my old PC ran Lightroom if I turn on full graphics acceleration)

CPU: Intel i7-9700K overclocked @ 4.6GHz (with liquid cooling my temps stay in the 40-50C range so this is not the issue and I have stress and stability tested with a suite of different software and games)

RAM: 16GB @ 3000MHz Dual Channel

GPU: RTX 2070 Super 8GB (I have tried fresh installs of both the gaming and studio drivers with no change in Lightroom)

Hard Drive: 1TB M.2 NMVe

OS: Windows 10 with the current updates installed

Hopefully this helps anyone having this problem by knowing you can solve the VRAM issue at least by disabling the "Use GPU for image processing" option and restarting Lightroom.  If you don't have a solid procressor though, this may slow you down as well and it is a shame to waste a powerful GPU for doing graphical work.  I believe there is third party software that will allow you to restrict how much RAM a process can use if regular RAM is your issue.  I have not found any programs that allow you to restrict VRAM for a given process though.

Thanks for everyone's input and suggestions.  Hopefully Adobe will see people having this issue and come up with some kind of fix for us.

Now I got the chance to check this with the 5GB Quadro P2000.

Here's with Photoshop open, working on a number of big files:

And here I launch Lightroom and start working:

So no problem here. Lightroom uses an additional 0.5 GB VRAM and stays there. Actually I'm surprised it didn't use more. The picture is pretty similar to what I got with the 2GB P600, but with less total VRAM the graph looked more dramatic.

In the OP's case, I suspect a buggy driver, or possibly plugins/extensions if he has any.

I looked some more at this (although still on the 2GB Quadro P600; so not a lot of VRAM).

But the functional principle seems pretty clear. This is a dynamic and changing reallocation of VRAM according to immediate needs. Having Lightroom open along with PS, Ai, ID, Br, with varying amounts of documents open/active in each, shows that they are all using different amounts of VRAM depending on circumstances.

Total usage never exceeds 85% no matter what I do. But proportions vary, which is shown by closing out and reopening the different apps. If it was a leak, it would keep rising until it hit the ceiling at 100%. That never happens.

It might surprise someone to learn that Firefox tends to take a significant chunk. Even MS Word produces a clearly visible bump in the graph!

This is how memory management should work. The memory is in use the whole time, but shifted between the different apps.

And to be perfectly clear: everything worked smoothly the whole time. No performance issues in Lightroom or anywhere else. Files in Lightroom are 36-45 MP raws, so on the largish side.

Is this windows specific? I run Classic for weeks at an end editing images, etc. and never shut it down. It just keeps running fine even though I launch photoshop, after effects and premiere while Lightroom is running. I completely agree with D_Fosse that it is normal for apps to use the GPU memory that they need and the graph above is not strange at all. This would not be something that would lead to crashing or instability. That is just not how modern memory management works. When another app request GPU memory, it will swap part of this out to the DMA or Shared GPU memory.

And I agree with D_fosse that this is probably not a bug but expected behavior and likely not the cause of the problem you are having with performance.