Delve Into Video Memory

I must have spent at least four hours hunting for a simple way to read the current used video memory from my system. I must have done everything at least once. Using the legacy DirectX API, created an OpenGL context to grab it that way, tapped into the WINAPI, used DxDiag, used DXGI and everything in between. You would think this relatively common requirement would be a simple DirectX command, but no, it's wrapped in mystery and riddled with dead-ends. After completely failing in this, I decided on a different approach and used GPU-Z window alongside the loading process and watched for video memory spikes that way. Can't waste days writing a robust video memory monitor when I have game engines to write.  If anyone has some 'working' code in C++ that can detect the 'remaining' (not total) amount of video memory on NVIDIA and AMD machines, please do post.

On proceeding the old fashioned way, I did uncover one crucial fact, which lead to a 400MB+ saving on one of my standalone levels. A cheeky claim, as it turns out when you encrypt media, it does not remember it was loaded, and subsequently loads it in again for any other entity that needs the reference. This would include entities of the same type, and more crucially light map textures. My run this morning crashed out at 1GB of video memory, my new test loaded, ran and leveled off at 805MB (673MB when divide all textures by 32) video memory (which included a large uncompressed Church texture which gobbled 128MB all by itself) :)  This brief journey puts me in a position where I can load in a lightmapped standalone level now, which is great!

There are still many targets for video memory savings here, and each site needs close study to get the best use of available budget. For now I will finish off my making some new entity asset conversions and then resume Thursday with more winning video saving antics.  Sorry for the lack of images, some days are nothing but words and deeds ;)