NVIDIA Working On A New OpenGL Memory Usage Extension

NVIDIA is working on a new OpenGL memory usage reporting extension, NV_query_resource. Before anyone jumps though to bash NVIDIA over coming up with yet-another-memory-reporting extension for OpenGL, this one is aimed at reporting the usage at an object-level rather than just overall amounts.

From the proposed extension, "OpenGL implementations manage the residence of textures, shaders, and other graphical objects in GPU accessible memory (whether in on-board video memory or addressable system memory is implementation dependent). With more insight into OpenGL's memory usage 1) applications could make educated decisions on better utilizing the limited GPU resources, 2) users could better optimize their workflow when working with multiple tools, and 3) administrators can make better decisions regarding resource allocation and system configurations. The purpose of this extension is to return a more detailed breakdown of memory usage in terms of the OpenGL objects residing in memory (textures, render buffers, buffer objects, system reserved objects, ...). This extension differs from GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info in that this extension returns detailed memory usage at the object level for video memory while the other extension only reports total vidmem usage."

NVIDIA is looking to expose this extension in their upcoming 387 driver series for OpenGL on the desktop. They are also proposing a NV_query_resource_tag extension for associating a tag with memory resource allocations.