Cheat Engine

supercharger · Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2012 9:55 am Post subject: clean up video card memory ?

hello, i encountered a problem recently.
a 3D game(quite a good one) seems to manage the video memory not well enough, after several times of starting and quiting, the textures on objects are not loaded correctly anymore, only very low detailed (mipmapped) textures are shown. closing the whole app doesn't solve the problem, i have to reboot the PC if i want to see correct textures.
this phenomena is not common among games but i have seen it on a few games.
i wonder if there is a function in D3D or OpenGL that flush everything in the video memory.
anyone knows?

my graphics card is ATI 9600 series mobile on a HP laptop.

Dark Byte · Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2012 10:16 am Post subject:

Are you sure it's the video memory and not just a result of overheating, causing the videocard to run at a lower speed, causing the game to pick a lower detail setting to get a decent framerate ?

supercharger · Posted: Wed Jul 04, 2012 1:56 pm Post subject:

i am not sure it's the video memory problem. but if that problem can only be solved by rebooting the PC (winXP), i guess it's because of garbages remaining in the memory.
it's possible that it's caused by overheating. but rebooting the PC takes like 10 seconds and that solves the problem everytime. on the contrary, i have tried re-entering the game after i've run other desktop apps (such as browsing the internet), without rebooting, the problem remains.
my graphic card setting is on max performance, without power saving. and i've turned off the auto LOD function of the game. i manage the game settings closely, there is not any change in game setting when the game runs normally or when the problem occurs.
and when the problem occurs, the detail of textures is so low that they almost look like flat color. and, once the problem occurs, it gets worse and worse every time i re-enter the game.
i googled "flush video memory", i found one possibly relevant result, mentioning the "flush" function comes with the game ARMA2. it says the function can flush the AGP memory used by graphics card. i guess it's possible to do so in Windows, but, is it done with built-in functions of D3D ?

atom0s · Posted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 2:03 am Post subject:

Perhaps this is a problem with your drivers? Have you given a look at installing the latest gfx drivers to see if that helps out

If you are certain its the games fault have you also tried contacting the game developers to report the issue first before taking things into your own hands with modding the client?

As for attempting to do things yourself. You could hook onto the games Direct3D pointer (if its using D3D) and try calling 'EvictManagedResources'.
http://forum.cheatengine.org/viewtopic.php?t=554079

I don't know if there is a similar command for OpenGL though.