Limit available VRAM?

[LuminaryJanitor]

I recently picked up a 3GB GX580, and I've been having some issues.

In a couple of games (namely, Quake 4 and Trackmania United), I'm getting really low-quality textures. Like, worse than my Nintendo 64. A bit of digging through the Quake 4 configs revealed the problem: the VRAM count is overflowing, and wrapping around to -1GB (byte count stored in a 32-bit signed integer, from the looks of it).

So I'm wondering, does anyone know how I can artificially limit the amount of available VRAM, to fool these games into thinking I'm under this 2GB ceiling?

 

[leSLIe]

unlikely in drivers, most likely in some ini file from quake. Check the quake 4 tweaking guides

but just to be sure, you can send me your card and I'll test it for ya indefinitely

 

[LuminaryJanitor]

I actually managed to get around it in Quake. Although it ignores any changes to the stored VRAM value, it still respects overridden texture quality settings. So it's only Trackmania that's giving me problems. But if it's happened twice in a month, there's a pretty high chance it's going to happen again, so I'm hoping for a more general solution rather than another game-specific workaround.

I've come across one possibility, which is to override the memory reporting functions in the Direct3D API. Writing DLL hooks is a bit outside my experience, though... I'm hoping for something a little easier .