Lets say I have 16 megs of vido memory on my video card, and I load exactly 16 megs of textures etc on it. Then, my program does not free uf the space it used. Is that memory permanantly gone until I restart, or is there a way to flush/reset the memory completely?

If you have 16-megs on your video card, it is using a bit for the screen, back-buffer, z-buffer... lookup tables for your textures loaded, etc.

Lets say you have a 640x480x16 double bufferd, and a 16-bit z-buffer. You just used about 1.8 megs right there, plus whatever other programs have video memory allocated. Anyways, back to your original question

If your program allocates video memory from windows, and it then exits without de-allocating the memory... windows is ussually pretty good at releasing it anyways... (not always 100% perfect, but ussually pretty good), this goes for system memory also.

Billy - BillyB@mrsnj.com
(Hey, I''''m no longer anonymous!)

no you can flush it. you can access all the meory for video data. the primary video buffer is always allocated to the soze of the current screen resolution. this thankfully actually protects you from allocating all the memory, crashing, and then windows would not be able to display anythign anymore.

NEVER rely on the OS to free memory. either free it, or dont allocate it. consider it 100% gone until you reboot. though in reality many times it will eventualy be released when the next exclusive mode app runs, but a coopertive app wont have the same luck.