Nvidia using a lot of memory

[gettingcup]

Hi, I am new to Mageia and I just installed Mageia 5 LXDE on 2 different machines and enabled the nvidia drivers.
I looked in the task manager and was surprised to see about 480mb ram being used at startup.
I changed to the nouveau driver and rebooted and I get about 180mb ram used at startup.
This happens on both a laptop and a desktop. What could be causing this?
I'd prefer not to use nouveau as it won't size correctly on the desktop and doesn't look very good on either.
Thank you!

[gettingcup]

I recently tried this also on a newer laptop- a Toshiba S855D-S5120, and I get the same result... high ram usage while using the Nvidia driver.
Can anyone tell me something? This must be a common occurrence. I'm not a beginner with Linux and know how to do a correct installation.
On all 3 of these computers I have installed Lubuntu, Mint, and Manjaro, and all of these distros used the Nvidia driver correctly without adding to the ram usage.
Why is Mageia 5 using am extra 300mb of ram to use a proprietary driver? I really want to like Mageia, but this issue is a dealbreaker if it can't be solved.
I tried another rpm distro for comparison- Rosa. When using the nvidia driver, ram usage stayed at about 175mb ram, compared to the 480mb+ ram usage of Mageia.
However, Rosa did periodically crash when using nvidia.
Thanks!