I've got a gazillion memory leaks in the D3D portion of my program. At the top of the list visual studio assails me with is lAllocID=1, which (should have realised from the beginning, but actually traced it) is the initial D3D object, m_pD3D. When my program exits, though, and I call m_pD3D->Release() in the destructor, the value it returns is 0, which means that there is no memory leak with this object, yes? What could cause this? How can I go about finding the culprit? Cheers,

The returned value from Release() is not guaranteed to mean anything - thus relying on it is not a good idea as you've just found out [wink]

D3D objects form a heirarchy - leaking a child will also register a leak in the parent. Thus you almost always end up with both your IDirect3D9 and IDirect3DDevice9 in the leaked/lAllocID list.

As for finding the source of your leak... lots of fun that one! You might want to try using PIX to run a full call-stream capture and checking any "Alive" resources at the very end of execution.

Failing that, you might want to examine your code to make sure you're not missing any SAFE_RELEASE() statements - note that you might have to release an interface multiple times if you've caused it to be AddRef()'d.

I've not had the time to finish it (yet), but you can also use COM intefaces via IDirect3DResource9::SetPrivateData() to trace memory leaks. Thats a whole lot more involved though.

hth
Jack

Quote:Original post by jollyjeffers
Failing that, you might want to examine your code to make sure you're not missing any SAFE_RELEASE() statements - note that you might have to release an interface multiple times if you've caused it to be AddRef()'d.

Ah cheers for the info, thats cleared up that mystery, but, err, SAFE_RELEASE(), what is that? Missing any.. I've not heard of it before..

SAFE_RELEASE() is a macro that wraps the following statements:

there are three: SAFE_RELEASE(), SAFE_DELETE() and SAFE_DELETE_ARRAY() - all simple macros defined in the DX SDK.

They don't do anything clever as such, just that they NULL the pointer after its deleted - which makes it easier to trap cases where you try and reuse a dead pointer [smile]

Check out an SDK header for the definitions; but off the top of my head:

#define SAFE_RELEASE(p) {if(p){(p)->Release();(p)=NULL;}}

hth
Jack

OKOKOK get the general idea of a SAFE_ macros.. So they dont affect whether you get memory leaks or not.

If visual studio debug window displays Direct3D memory leaks, but doesnt display any memory leaks via crtdbg.h's _CrtMemDumpStatistics, does this mean that my memory leaks are all in video memory?

Does D3D memory leak detection ALWAYS refer to video memory leaks? Can I rule out any objects created with 'new' in this case, i.e. its definately an object created via a built-in D3D function?