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I am memory profiling my game in Visual Studio and about 60% of memory usage is happening from calls to glBufferData(). I may be missing something but should this consume GPU memory instead of system memory? I call it using GL_ARRAY_BUFFER and GL_STATIC_DRAW I was just wondering is there a way I can force it to use only VRAM?

Visual Studio attributes the memory usage to "nvoglv32.dll"

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up vote 2 down vote

Some relevant notes: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5181540/gpu-access-to-system-ram It's talking about OpenCL & cuda but the same ideas apply.

Lots of VRAM will help performance, but the OpenGL driver is always free to allocate memory as it sees fit, and move it around as needed. Your hints may help it, but you cannot "force" it to allocate only on VRAM or system RAM.

(In your particular case, perhaps you are allocating more than will fit on the graphics card at one time?)

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It appears to be regardless of how much I use, if I allocate 1mb of buffer data it uses 1mb of system memory internally. I just wanted to know if this sort of behavior is normal. – bleevo Feb 8 '15 at 9:13
    
The good news is: Don't sweat it! There's an arms race carried out in cubicle farms at nvidia and ati and other places to get their performance better than the other guys. They toil so we don't have to. ... ok that's an exaggeration, we still need to sort-of know what's going on. And profiling like you're doing and wondering about it is the right thing to do. But ya, what they do by default will usually be pretty good. – david van brink Feb 8 '15 at 18:03

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