# GPU Memory Usage Monitor?

## rada

Hi, I'm wondering if there are any tools which can monitor GPU memory usage.  I have seen this in a few apps and games but never in a system monitor tool.

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## Roman_Gruber

Nice Idea, did you find anything?

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## bLUEbYTE84

I don't think this is possible except inside the actual 3d application internally. The reason is that the allocation of video ram is done in a way that is not similar to the, say, system RAM.

The video RAM is allocated for two purposes:

1-Frame-buffer: Constant, computable ( widthxheightxbpp/8 bytes)

2-Texture storage: As I said, no generic way to monitor this. Only possibility is the implementing it inside the application I think.

You can map to video memory just like the real RAM and read it(via kernel fusion device interface), for instance you might see something like:

132475234238052304587634852365235000000000000

in which case you would say "X percent of the memory is not yet allocated(all zeros)". But this has two problems:

AFAIK the video memory is all-zero only on fresh powerons. Plus, I don't think the unused(de-alloced) sections are cleared.

Another possibility might be implementing it in driver or OpenGL-library level. In the first case I suspect this would require hardware assistance. But I'm not sure about that.

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