   VBOs - Low level storage handling?
  Hi,I've been using VBOs to render my meshes for quite some time now... And recently I've been wondering what happens to VBOs internally.Is it really safe to just import vertex-data, build and upload VBOs to GPU-memory and just use the location-handle provided by OpenGL to adress and render the meshes? What happens when all those VBOs exceed the GPU memory? Does the driver automatically save them to the slower system-RAM? If so: is there any feedback where the VBOs are actually stored? Do you get a GL_OUT_OF_MEMORY exception? (or something alike)?I would love to hear how you guys handle that and what you'r experiences are with many big VBOs. 
  I assume it will just render them out of system memory. Note that just because you give some data to OpenGL it doesn't necessarily mean that it ends up in the VRAM. You're just giving the data to the driver to manage, and from there it will decide what it wants to do with it based on the current contents of the vram, expected usage of the data, size of the data, etc. So I believe it is safe to send to opengl any amount of vertices without being afraid it will crash your program because it doesn't have enough vram, as long as it will fit in system memory. The driver continually evicts resources if it needs the vram to store other things. If so: is there any feedback where the VBOs are actually stored?[/quote]I don't think so. This is one of those things that the vendors are supposed to handle transparently, its not a requirement that they let you know what they're doing behind the scenes. There used to be a function called glAreTexturesResident, which would tell you if your texture was in vram or system memory at the time of the call, but I think it was deprecated and never really implemented by the gpu vendors.;  GL doesn't know what system RAM or VRAM is. There is nothing about it in the spec.But in reality, yes they do swap between system RAM and VRAM.If it is a problem for you, then you need a GPU with more VRAM. and i suppose more RAM.   