Texture flickering issue reappeared after 'the big update'

[stellarhopper]

Your system information

• System information from steam (Steam -> Help -> System Information) in a gist: https://gist.github.com/stellarhopper/341bd08f8389a2b24ff773b62ce7be01
• Have you checked for system updates?: Yes
• Are you using the latest stable video driver available for your system? Yes
• Have you verified the game files?: Yes

Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:

This is similar to #27, the symptoms are exactly the same as the youtube clip linked there.
This would happen infrequently before the Big Update, but has been much more consistent since then.

Dropping the video settings way down seems to temporarily fix it, but slowly turning things on didn't find an immediate culprit.

The video card is an Nvidia GTX 980.

Steps for reproducing this issue:

1. Start a game
2. Ensure video settings are med/high
3. Issue occurs 'soon enough'

[danginsburg]

This seems surprising for it to be happening on a 4GB GPU since we should be using < 2GB. Can you run with -con_logfile when this happens and upload game/dota/console.log? Also, can you have nvidia-smi running and see how much GPU memory is consumed overall on the system? I'm thinking it may be something else on your machine using up GPU memory causing us to start evicting textures to try to make up for it.

[stellarhopper]

@danginsburg I tried to reproduce this in a quick bot game but wasn't able to. I did notice that even before starting the game, I was using over 2G of the available 4G GPU memory:

Thu Nov  7 10:45:38 2019       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 435.21       Driver Version: 435.21       CUDA Version: 10.1     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GTX 980     Off  | 00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
|  5%   60C    P0    46W / 185W |   2186MiB /  4043MiB |      5%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                               
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID   Type   Process name                             Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0      1599      G   /usr/libexec/Xorg                             72MiB |
|    0      1748      G   /usr/bin/gnome-shell                          49MiB |
|    0      2168      G   /usr/libexec/Xorg                            784MiB |
|    0      2296      G   gnome-shell                                  417MiB |
|    0      2781      G   /usr/bin/nextcloud                             2MiB |
|    0      3870      G   ...quest-channel-token=9562361383393835526     8MiB |
|    0      7808      G   ...uest-channel-token=11486817017048631444    37MiB |
|    0     10768      G   ...t_PrusaSZfm4ou/usr/bin/bin/prusa-slicer   100MiB |
|    0     15395      G   ./Simplify3D                                  67MiB |
|    0     17317      G   ...er/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam    31MiB |
|    0     17346      G   ./steamwebhelper                               2MiB |
|    0     17361      G   ...quest-channel-token=3910522723913327640   142MiB |
|    0     23757      G   openscad                                      66MiB |
|    0     31617      G   ...quest-channel-token=8220175961307235026   353MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

During my test game, Underlords never rose to above 1325M or so (maxed out all graphics settings):

Thu Nov  7 12:04:17 2019       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 435.21       Driver Version: 435.21       CUDA Version: 10.1     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GTX 980     Off  | 00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| 40%   73C    P0    79W / 185W |   3658MiB /  4043MiB |     12%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                               
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID   Type   Process name                             Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0      1599      G   /usr/libexec/Xorg                             72MiB |
|    0      1748      G   /usr/bin/gnome-shell                          49MiB |
|    0      2168      G   /usr/libexec/Xorg                            920MiB |
|    0      2296      G   gnome-shell                                  441MiB |
|    0      2781      G   /usr/bin/nextcloud                             2MiB |
|    0      3870      G   ...quest-channel-token=9562361383393835526     8MiB |
|    0      4220    C+G   ...ords/game/bin/linuxsteamrt64/underlords  1325MiB |
|    0      7808      G   ...uest-channel-token=11486817017048631444    41MiB |
|    0     10768      G   ...t_PrusaSZfm4ou/usr/bin/bin/prusa-slicer   100MiB |
|    0     15395      G   ./Simplify3D                                  67MiB |
|    0     17317      G   ...er/.local/share/Steam/ubuntu12_32/steam    31MiB |
|    0     17346      G   ./steamwebhelper                               2MiB |
|    0     17361      G   ...quest-channel-token=3910522723913327640   151MiB |
|    0     23757      G   openscad                                      66MiB |
|    0     31617      G   ...quest-channel-token=8220175961307235026   319MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

So it seems reasonable that if the 2G limit was approached, or if I had say other chrome tabs or something using up some more space, that I would hit the 4G mark.

I'll keep an eye on things, and if it happens again I'll report back. We can otherwise close this issue for now. Thanks for the pointer on nvidia-smi, that looks like a useful tool!