Insufficient VRAM and high VRAM activity
Fix Degraded State errors 13, 24, 25 ("Insufficient VRAM") and 18 ("High VRAM activity"): too much of your GPU's memory is in use when the compatibility check runs.
What it means: A customer's job may need nearly your entire graphics card's memory (VRAM). Before offering you a job, Salad measures how much of it is already in use. 13, 24 and 25 mean too much was taken; 18 means something was reading and writing VRAM heavily at the time. The check isn't about how much VRAM the card has - a 12 GB card passes when it's free - it's about what else is holding it.
Why it happens: Something is using the card while Salad checks it:
- A game, a local AI model (Ollama, LM Studio, Stable Diffusion), a video editor, OBS, a browser with hardware acceleration and many tabs, or wallpaper engines.
- Windows itself on high-resolution or multiple monitors, plus RGB and monitoring overlays.
- A second dedicated GPU: the check may land on the busy card.
- ECC memory enabled on workstation cards, which reserves part of the VRAM (error 101 - see How to disable ECC).
What to do
See what's using the GPU
Open Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc), go to Performance > GPU and look at Dedicated GPU memory usage. On the Processes tab, right-click a column header, enable GPU and GPU engine, and sort by GPU. Close anything above a few percent, or anything holding more than a small amount of dedicated memory.
Close background GPU users
Local AI tools and overlays keep models and buffers in VRAM even when idle. Quit them fully (tray icon > Exit), not just the window. Salad is designed to run while you're away from the PC with everything else closed.
Check for a second GPU
With two dedicated cards, disable the one you don't want Salad to use under Settings > Configure Hardware (why).
Retry
Click Retry on the notification, or restart Salad. The check runs again before the next job.
Nothing running, still failing?
A driver that reports memory wrongly can also trigger this. If Task Manager shows the card nearly empty and the error persists, do a clean reinstall of the GPU driver: How to reinstall your GPU drivers.
Still stuck?
Send Salad Support a screenshot of Task Manager's GPU page taken while the error shows, the notification with its error number, and your logs folder zipped (how to find it).
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Salad cannot access your GPU
Fix Degraded State errors 11, 12, 19, 21 and 22 ("Salad cannot access your GPU", "GPU drivers out of date"): the GPU isn't usable from inside the container environment.
High GPU usage, temperature, or the check can't run
Fix Degraded State errors 16 ("High GPU usage"), 17 ("High GPU temperature") and 41 ("Unable to run compatibility test").