NVIDIA Driver Update Silently Enables ECC, Costing Consumer GPUs 1.5GB VRAM
MastMaithun · reddit · 2026-08-14
A user experiencing frequent black screen crashes while running ComfyUI and video generation models discovered that a recent NVIDIA driver update automatically enabled the ECC (Error Correction Code) state.
Enabling ECC on consumer GPUs (like the RTX series) allocates about 1.5GB of VRAM for error correction, significantly reducing the memory available for AI inference. After manually turning off ECC, the user not only recovered the lost VRAM and improved 3DMark scores, but also completely resolved the ComfyUI crashing issue. This serves as a highly practical troubleshooting tip for VRAM-sensitive local AI developers.
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