(In reply to Efrem McCrimon from comment #97)
> Created attachment 128179 [details]
> attachment-14321-0.html
> 
> Hi all:
> 
> Please help me understand the ram issue on the video card, is too many
> buffers created?  I did not have this problem on a 4.6 kernel, now the
> kernel has been upgraded twice, 4.8.5, and now 4.8.6.  No problems using a
> 960 GTX w/4GB DDR5 memory, plus I have a secondary 730 GTw/1GB RAM.

The issue is that the 4GB are laid out "funny" on a GTX 970 (but not other
models), and nouveau doesn't properly handle that.

You had this problem on a 4.6 kernel, as it was the first to provide the
secboot firmware loading functionality (assuming you had the firmware in
place). To get back to the previous behavior, remove the firmware, or boot with
nouveau.noaccel=1 nouveau.nofbaccel=1 which should avoid initializing the
graphics accel engine. (And hopefully avoid secboot as well, but I'm not 100%
sure.)