Controlling video memory fragmentation

[Cypher]

I'm sitting on the "don't worry about it" side of the fence. What you're asking for is a way to spend tons of times and resources on something that you will simply not be able to do as well as the existing drivers. You might think you need absolute 100% control over it, but chances are you'd make the performance go DOWN and not up by managing the memory manually. Yes, it's a dead end. But it's also a dead end for a path that is really unnecessary to go down. Focus on other parts of your renderer that are more dire. Try to do some performance testing to figure out where your program can be sped up, and focus your time and energy on that instead.

 

[ERP]

On a PC where you don't know what the texture alignment restrictions for the particular chipset are.
How much video memory the board has, how much of that is taken up by buffers you don't allocate etc etc etc.... It just falls into let the hardware vendor worry about it category.

 

[Rodéric]

Well memory fragmentation also come from making lots of new/delete, and for GPU it's the same, if you create delete lots of resources and not serial (ie not clear everything and reload everything) you'd better manage your resources so as not to create objects/buffers too often to reduce fragmentation.