It is like that for everyone. It doesn't affect anything, just Steam being incapable as usual...

It might affect performance in some games, since they can't detect the VRAM either and consequently probably can't use it. If you know of any benchmarking tools that could prove one way or another, feel free to let me know.

I wouldn't buy games which use such dirty coding that resorts to asking Steam about VRAM amount or any hardware... Steam using the wrong method doesn't mean games can't detect VRAM either. It is actually as easy as typing "dmesg | grep drm" into a terminal... Probably there are more ways to do it, even programmatically.

Originally posted by LOLCAT:

I wouldn't buy games which use such dirty coding that resorts to asking Steam about VRAM amount or any hardware...

What I meant is that Valve's own games probably use the same method as Steam since they're programmed by the same people.

A new OpenGL extension was introduced some time ago to tackle exactly this issue. Currently, there is absolutely no other common way to determine how much VRAM is available - the only universal piece of information is the PCI memory mapping window, which is pretty much always 256 MiB large (if there is >= 256 MiB VRAM). I doubt that Valve's games would even need more than that, though...

TF2 has about a hundred different cosmetic items on-screen at any given time and has to dynamically allocate space for them; it wouldn't surprise me if it did need more than that.

Pure geometry is a joke nowadays. Have you ever taken a closer look at custom meshes used by Skyrim mods? Experienced game designers use their experience and a lot of tricks to get a maximum of details out of a minimum of data, a lot of amateurs creating mods compensate their lack of that knowledge by directly increasing the details of the mesh and textures. The amount of polygons and texture pixels that sum up in a small scene simply by using some armor mods is totally insane, yet mediocre video cards handle it surprisingly well.

Modern high end games consume a lot of VRAM by using complex and memory-intensive shaders. I simply can't see any of this complexity in Valve's games, they are still rather "traditional".