I’ve mentioned the concept of VRAM (video memory) in a few articles, but I still find constant confusion among readers of this site as well as coworkers and colleagues in day-to-day work with Stage3D. Today’s article will hopefully clear up the differences, dispel some myths, and help you make the best use of both of them.
Posts Tagged vram
Flash 11’s new Stage3D enables us to make amazing 3D games and applications in Flash. It also burdens us with two forms of memory: the system memory (RAM) we’re used to and the video card’s memory (VRAM) that stores objects like textures, buffers, and shaders. In order to not use more VRAM than the player’s video card has, we must know how much VRAM they have. Unfortunately, the Stage3D API does not provide us with this information. Today’s article provides a workaround function that allows you to quickly test your players’ VRAM. UPDATED to fix some bugs in the test
At long last, Flash Player 11 has been released and carries with it a raft of exciting new features. Perhaps most exciting is the inclusion of the new Stage3D class (and related libraries) to enable GPU-accelerated graphics rendering. Today’s article will be the first to cover this new API and discusses one of its features: reading back the rendered scene into a BitmapData that you can put on the regular Stage. Surely this will be a popular operation for merging 3D and 2D, so let’s see how fast it is!