VMA dumps

• For memory management, Inexor uses AMD’s Vulkan Memory Allocator library (VMA).

• VMA can export an overview of the current GPU memory allocations into a JSON file which can be converted into an image using VMA’s VmaDumpVis.

• This way we can see which memory pools exist, which memory blocks are allocated, and what they are used for.

• The example image provided here might look very simple, but with increasing complexity of our engine this will turn out very helpful.

This is a very simple example of such an image generated with VmaDumpVis:

Example: march 2020 texture memory corruption bug

• In march 2020, a bug in Inexor’s early graphics memory management caused textures to corrupt on window resize.

• VmaDumpVis helped to resolve the issue by proving the memory consumption increased after each resize, which means the texture memory was simply not freed when the swapchain was recreated.

• This is an example of how VMA and VmaDumpVis make debugging graphics memory easier.