How Much Video Card Memory Is Being Used?

SnappyCrunch

I'm looking for a utility to tell me how much video card memory is being used at any particular point.
I could just add up the sizes of all the textures, but not all the NS textures are displayed on screen at any given time, and therefore they're not all in the video card memory at a given time.
I'm pretty sure NS will fill up a 16MB card, say, when you're in the marine base, or a hive, but what about a 32MB card?

So does anyone know of such a utility? I understand that it might be ATi or nVidia specific; that's okay.

Condizzle

<a href='http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,22441,00.asp' target='_blank'>http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_desc...id,22441,00.asp</a>

<!--emo&:D--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html//emoticons/biggrin-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='biggrin-fix.gif' /><!--endemo--> It also helps to free up ram after you're done playing.

SnappyCrunch

Thanks for the reply, Condizzle, but I was specifically looking for something that would tell me how much <b>video</b> memory I was using, not <b>system</b> memory. It's possible I missed something in the program, though I looked all through the options and didn't see anything related to video memory.

SnappyCrunch

I found an answer: you can't do this.

It turns out I was looking in the wrong place. Google wasn't where I needed to be, it was the GameDev.net forums, where people have been asking my question for years. It seems there are three kinds of memory - video card memory, AGP memory, and system memory. The video driver handles the assigning of texture to these memorys, and there's no simple or reliable way to get a straight answer out of it, because there's no standard, and you can't access the video card directly. The best anyone can come to even total video memory is a ballpark, and you can just forget about getting a real time update on how much is currently being used.

There's only one thing that comes close to what I need, and it's NVPerfHUD. It only works for newish nVidia video cards running Direct3D 9 programs, though. HL isn't D3D 9, and even if it was, NS crashes when I try to use D3D.

So yeah, thanks to anyone who gave a moment's thought to my question.