VRAM Leak Mitigator

This is a UE4SS .lua mod that reduces (NOT FULLY eliminates) Palworld's VRAM leak.

The Problem

Palworld has had a VRAM leak since its alpha release that has never been fixed by Pocketpair. What that means is that based on the available VRAM in your system, your stable playing session times are limited to how long it takes for Palworld to fill up your GPU's VRAM budget, after which the game will start paging memory to your system RAM, causing heavy persistent stutters, regardless of your setup, as this is a universal engine-level issue. Unless you are not a broke boy and have the best nvidia cards, or you are just a gigachad AMD GPU owner, your stable session times, which means how long you have until Palworld completely fills out your VRAM budget, are about 60-90 minutes, which is heavily influenced by how many fast travels you do or how much you travel across the open world. The only actual solution to this so far has been restarting the game after the VRAM budget overflow.

What this mod does

By a specific set configurable interval, it briefly forces UE5's texture streaming pool down and drops streamed mip levels, then restores it back to the normal setting. This nudges the engine into releasing GPU memory it would otherwise keep holding onto normally. It's a periodic, automated version of what you'd otherwise do by restarting the game. What it does not: fix the underlying issue. In testing, the mod reduced the rate of VRAM growth by roughly 20-25%, meaningfully extending stable session time before stutter sets in. It did not eliminate the growth entirely. If you still hit your VRAM ceiling on very long sessions, a restart is still the complete workaround.

Setup

[olist] [*]Subscribe to UE4SS (Experimental/latest build recommended) here in the Steam Workshop. [*]Edit the config.lua and set NormalPoolSize according to your GPUs VRAM budget. Adjust this value following the lookup table below (or roughly equal to 75-80% of your GPUs VRAM): [/olist] [table] [tr] [th]GPU VRAM[/th] [th]NormalPoolSize[/th] [/tr] [tr] [td]4 GB[/td] [td]3277[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]6 GB[/td] [td]4608[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]8 GB[/td] [td]6144[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]12 GB[/td] [td]9216[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]16 GB[/td] [td]12288[/td] [/tr] [tr] [td]24 GB[/td] [td]18432[/td] [/tr] [/table]

If you don't know where this file is: Either navigate to >>>YOUR MAIN STEAM FOLDER LOCATION<<< \SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Palworld\Mods\NativeMods\UE4SS\Mods\VRAMLeakMitigator\Scripts or right click Palworld in your Steam Library -> Manage -> Browse local files -> Navigate to: \Mods\NativeMods\UE4SS\Mods\VRAMLeakMitigator\Scripts where you will need to edit a file called config or config.lua (You will have to first subscribe to VRAM Leak Mitigator in order for this file to apper.)

An example for how that row should look like in the config file for someone with 12GB of GPU VRAM (comma is important at the end of the line):

NormalPoolSize = 9216,[/code]

[b]!!!WARNING!!![/b] [u]SKIPPING THESE STEPS WILL STOP THE MOD FROM WORKING[/u] [b]!!!WARNING!!![/b]

The other config values may be edited according to how aggressive you want to make the cleanup process. Note that pushing these values too far will cause textures and geometry to load in too slowly, which will appear in the form of pop-ins and textures appearing smudgy or blurry up close for a bit.

[h1]Notes[/h1]
Editing your engine.ini and forcing a TemporaryPoolSize will unfortunately not prevent Palworld's engine from leaking over the set VRAM limit. While other settings may improve streaming performance, this specific setting will not prevent or even mitigate the leak, hence why this mod exists.

This mod will not help if your stutter is caused by something else (driver issues, mod conflicts, etc.)

If you experience stutters in Palworld, I would highly recommend the [url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3768350664]Stutter Fix Pack[/url] by SolTeLu and [url=https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3777817980]No inventory or storage lag[/url] by Shady which mods eliminate a lot of stutters unrelated to VRAM leaks and work great alongside each other.

[b]For those who still have issues with stutters due to VRAM paging, I highly recommend [url=https://www.nexusmods.com/palworld/mods/2972?tab=description]these engine.ini tweaks[/url] from nexusmods. When it comes to mitigating the overflow itself they might actually do a better job than this mod.[/b]