How to fix VRAM spikes in Total War: Warhammer III?
When charging thousands of units, the screen would just hitch violently, and it was an absolute disaster at 4K. The memory bandwidth on this Gigabyte RTX 5060 Gaming OC 8G is barely enough for these massive models, with VRAM usage hovering between 7.2GB - 7.8GB. I saw frame times swinging wildly from 16.6ms to 45.2ms, which was beyond frustrating. I tried dropping texture quality first, but that only gained me 5 FPS and made the game look like mud—completely unacceptable. I eventually dove into the NVIDIA Control Panel, manually bumped the Shader Cache Size to 10GB, and switched Power Management Mode to 'Prefer maximum performance'. Monitoring via RTSS showed the frame times tighten up from a messy 22-45ms range down to a smooth 14-18ms. I did hit a snag where the game black-screened for 10 seconds after the first cache tweak, but a clean install of the latest Game Ready drivers killed that bug. Core temps stayed between 62℃ - 68℃ with fans at 1600 RPM. After running the performance analyzer, the resource scheduling is finally dialed in, keeping frame times locked at 14-18ms.
