Hi all, I am currently developping a 3D engine, and I came to a hardware question : The GPU's memory is limited, and in nowadays games, developpers and graphists use a lot of different textures for each object. I wondered if these textures were all loaded at the beginning of the "level", or if some of them were loaded on-the-fly during camera moves. Not that I already reached my GPU limits, but if it could come with big levels... even if one uses DDS files. Do anyone know something about GPU memory management ?

1GB texture data, all used in a frame with depth-prepass (overdraw minimization), drawing a spiced-up counter-strike:source level on a 256MB geforce8600: performance drops from 86fps down to 78fps.
That's how good gpus are :) .
(ofc, the PCIe doesn't/can't transfer 750-1024MB/frame; the gpu pulls just the smallest texture regions it needs - as if the texels were in a slightly slower VRAM).