Texturepage VRAM Debugger

VRAM Debugger asset provides information about number of loaded (Unpacked) textures into GPU memory and also informs about the size of these textures.

When you target HD artstyle, you should manage texture loads properly and avoid buffer overflows as it causes the project to crash. With this tool you can easily understand what is actual (real-time) texture load as well as what is VRAM usage within your project.

Each unpacked texture page takes up space in VRAM. Once number of texture pages exceeds the available GPU, VRAM your game theoretically crashes. There is a lot of variance in how different GPU models and drivers handle this situation, but under some circumstances it can lead to an application crash or even worse, to system crashes. For that reason, this tool helps you manage and debug current VRAM usage of your project. For example 25 unpacked texture pages with 2048x2048 resolution take up 400 MB  of VRAM. If you want to support 512MB GPU you shouldn't exceed this number, as some VRAM space is reserved also by OS and other applications.  

Debugger is very simple to use and only few things are needed in order to debugger overlay to works correctly:

• Define all your existing texture groups
• Define number of sprites which are on separate texture pages
• Define your texture size
• Define your GPU VRAM maximum capacity

Features:

• Shows you a total number of texture pages on your project
• Shows you an actual number of „Unpacked“ texture pages that are actually loaded into GPU VRAM
• Shows how much space of the VRAM actually „Unpacked“ texture pages takes.
• You can set refresh rate of the overlay (default is each fifteenth step)

Only basic knowledge of GML is need for implementation and it can be run any project, however the overlay is more suitable on more complex projects with HD graphics.