Actually displaying VRAM

Hey GLs,

Believe me, I have searched this before posting. But being a complete green when it comes to OpenGL I haven’t been able to synthesize my own solution from the several basic tutorials.

What I want is quite simple, really. I’d like to use the VRAM in a generally unintended way, by just browsing what’s there at the moment. Naturally, some recursion will occur when using an openGL window to display this, but that should be fine.

Could someone give me a couple of pointers how to systematically browse the contents of my video memory?

You can not do that with OpenGL.

Ha bummer. That’s short and bitter.
Any leads on how I might be able to achieve this though?

No generally possible way. GPUs do their own virtual-memory mapping and garble some data.

The OS is never going to let you have this kind of direct access to hardware either. No modern OS will; you’ll have to go through a layer of some kind that will impose restrictions on what you can and cannot do at lower levels.