How to reduce and lower VRAM usage in Blender

In this article I’ll take a look at a few tips and tricks on how to reduce and lower VRAM usage in Blender. I can be the first one to say it, I need more VRAM, especially when I work with photorealistic scenes. I had this one scene that I had worked on for several days, it all looked good in the viewport, I then hit Render and wait… Then I see the dreaded message “System out of GPU memory”. Well damn, what now?

Buy a new graphics card

Definitely the best option. But seeing as graphic cards are just getting more expensive by the year, I understand that this option will be only for those with fat wallets. If you got the money, I would recommend something like the RTX 4090 from Nvidia. Beefy and pretty expensive, but with 24 GB of VRAM you’ll have a hard time ever seeing that annoying error message when rendering.

Turn off the viewport

Yeah, it actually works. If you’re rendering a heavy scene and getting maxxed out of VRAM, try closing the viewport in the background or just switching to something like the UV editor. This is because when the viewport is active it consumes VRAM, so turning it off reduces overall VRAM usage in Blender.

Lower the amount of detail

Do you really need 8K textures and super high poly counts on all of your scene assets? Most likely not! Just by “degrading” some of the assets that are visible in your scene, you can reduce the VRAM usage and get a render going. Lower quality textures and less polygons are the way to go.

If you’re duplicating objects you can use ALT + D instead of SHIFT + D, that way you’re just making instances instead of brand new objects.

Close other programs

Sometimes the solution lies outside Blender. If you’re using Chrome with lots of tabs open, especially YouTube, chances are they’re eating your virtual RAM! Make it a habit to close Chrome when rendering.

Use your CPU

It’s way slower, but your CPU most likely has access to more memory than your graphics card. I would only recommend this option if all else fails.

Render passes

If you have a complex scene it can be worth a shot to divide into several separate passes. It will take a little bit render everything, along with the compositing, but it could be a potential solution if you’re running out of VRAM in Blender.

Command Line Rendering

Whenever you render in Blender, you’re using VRAM to display each rendered frame. By using command line rendering you’re removing the ability to see the image and thus reducing the memory usage.

Restart your computer

Sometimes the classic “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” does wonders. So if you’re still having issues, try a simple restart. It has worked for me several times before. The biggest downside is that after a while the VRAM usage goes up. So not really a “long term” solution.

Memsaver

The creators of Botaniq released a new plugin called Memsaver that automatically reduces VRAM consumption. It optimizes textures and mesh based on their size and distance to the camera. No point having a 1 million poly object when it’s 50 meters away from the camera.

I have written a review of Memsaver if you’re interested in hearing my thoughts.

Conclusion and thoughts

Unfortunately the best solution is the one that cost the most amount of money.. A new GPU.

Luckily there are some other solutions for us that can’t shell $1,500 just like that. By being smart with your scene and actually doing some minor planning, you can save yourself from both eating up all VRAM but also reducing your render times.

If you do have some money to spend and want to automate things, I highly recommend Memsaver. It’s been in my plugin library since their first release and really makes things so much easier.

Do you have any secret tricks? Share them down in the comments!