OpenGL - what does glDeleteTextures actually do?

Question

Hi all,

(Mac OS X, iOS apps)

Q. What does glDeleteTextures actually do, on the above platforms?

(The official documentation is... sparse, at best.)

In terms of mem management, do the textures actually get removed from the video card? (Or at least their space set to reusable?)

Cheers.

Answer 1

It basically signals the OpenGL implementation that you want to dispose the resources allocated to a texture. The resources (VRAM, System RAM, etc) aren't deallocated right away, since the GPU might still be using them. But you can be sure that they will be deallocated.