VRAM leak occuring even without raytracing.

I thought the VRAM leak will only occur if I enable Ray Tracing. I completely abandoned the idea of enabling that setting cause my vram usage would flare up way above my gpu's 8GB vram and would render the game almost unplayable. I already finished the game four years ago and it was smooth as butter prior to the next gen update. With the news of a new expansion I decided to play the game again and try out the next gen update. So currently I'm playing the game at 1440p, utra+ no ray tracing but DLSS 4.5 enabled preset M ultra performance. FPS was smooth barely dipping below 60fps. I been playing for almost an hour prior to this post. So I needed to load to my most recent save after I died when I noticed the vram usage suddenly went up to 8.9gb at the loading screen and when it loaded up my fps hovered around the mid 40 and it was choppy as heck. The vram usage indicator say my gpu is consuming around 6.5gb. So the vram leak can still occur even if I had ray tracing turned off? Also I tried the supposed vram leak fix. Forcing AF in the nvidia driver setting all of that results to the game looking like dog poop. Even if I turned sharpness to high it doesn't look as good as the game's in-game AF.