CODEWITHSUNDEEP
memorymemory-managementgpu
badso
badso

Reputation: 109

How does browser GPU memory usage works?

By pressing F12 and then Esc on Chrome, you can see a few options to tick. One of them is show FPS meter, which allows us to see GPU memory usage in real time. I have a few questions regarding this GPU memory usage:

  1. This GPU memory means the memory the webpage needs to store its code: variables, methods, images, cached videos, etc. Is this right to affirm?
  2. Is there a reason as to why it has an upper bound of 512 Mb? Is there a way to reduce or increase it?
  3. How much GPU memory usage is enough to see considerable slowdown on browser navigation?
  4. If I have an array with millions of elements (just hypothetically), and I splice all the elements in the array, will it free the memory that was in use? Or will it not "really" free the memory, requiring an additional step to actually wipe it out?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2022

Answers (1)

StarShine
StarShine

Reputation: 2050

1. What is stored in GPU memory

Although there are no hard-set rules on the type of data that can be stored in GPU-memory, the bulk of GPU memory generally contains single-frame resources like textures, multi-frame resources like vertex buffers and index buffer data, and programmable-shader compiled code fragments. So while in theory it is possible to store video's in GPU memory, as well as all kinds of other bulk data, in practice, for every streamed video only a bunch of frames will ever be in GPU-ram.

The main reason for this soft-selection of texture-like data sets is that a GPU is a parallel hardware architecture, and it expects the data to be compatible with that philosophy, which means that there are no inter-dependencies between sets of data (i.e. pixels). Decoding images from a video stream is more or less the same as resolving interdependence between data-blocks.

2. Is 512MB enough for everyone?

No. It's probably based on your hardware.

3. When does GPU memory become slow?

You have to know that some parts of the GPU memory are so fast you can't even start to appreciate the speed. There is nothing wrong with the speed of a GPU card. What matters is the time it takes to get the data IN that memory in the first place. That is called bandwidth, and the operations usually need to be synchronized. In that case, the driver will lock the Northbridge bus so that data can flow from main memory into GPU memory, and this locking + transfer takes quite some time.

So to answer the question, once it is uploaded, the GUI will remain fast, no matter how much more memory is used on the GPU card. The only thing that can slow it down, are changes to the GUI, and other GPU processes taking time to complete that may interfere with rendering operations.

4. Splicing ram memory frees it up?

I'm not quite sure what you mean by splicing. GPU memory is freed by applications that release that memory by using the API calls to do that. If you want to render you GPU memory blank, you'd have to grab the GPU handles of the resources first, upload 'clear' data into them, and then release the handles again, but (for normal single-threaded GPU applications) you can only do that in your own process context.

Upvotes: 2

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