Yes, that’s correct, Vantage doesn’t do dynamic load/unload of V-Ray Proxies.
That kind of memory saving is more suitable for bucket rendering where the buckets being rendered don’t need all geometry in the scene at once.
Btw, the UI in your screen-shot shows how much additional memory you need for the high quality render.
It won’t show differences in the amount of GPU memory used for geometry.
However, you are correct that there is no difference between mesh and proxy.
You can save GPU memory by:
- rendering at a lower resolution
- making sure “dynamic textures” are enabled
- lowering the displacement tessellation level from Edit → Preferences… → Render Defaults
- disabling render elements you don’t need
- lowering VRayFur settings, so less strands are generated
Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev
You can also try disabling Safe GPU Allocations.
This might allow Vantage to use up to half of your physical CPU memory.
This doesn’t always work though, so if it doesn’t work for you, please send us your scene and the debug log (this will tells us your OS, driver and GPU),
so we can experiment with it and hopefully improve the behavior.
Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev
Wow, thank you very much for the fast and detailed answer!! 
