OpenGL Insights

540 VI Debugging and Profiling

38.5 Conclusion

The amount of available dedicated graphics memory may affect application execu-

tion significantly. Discrete graphics adapters are more sensitive to memory overload

since onboard memory has higher throughput and significantly outperforms system

memory. When memory utilization reaches full capacity, OpenGL object manage-

ment is likely to cause a negative impact on the application’s performance due to

object swapping or access to objects residing in the shared system memory. In order

to help applications avoid reaching memory limits, GPU vendors provide extensions

for determining the amount of available gra ...