VMA dumps

Note

Read VMA’s documentation of this feature here.

Warning

This feature is currently not implemented because we do not yet use vmaBuildStatsString. This page will be updated with ticket 538.

  • We use Vulkan Memory Allocator (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 tool.

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

  • This is a very simple example of such an image generated from a memory dump with VMA’s VmaDumpVis.:

../../_images/vma-1.png

  • 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.