Video memory getting filled with unused textures?

Hello,

I’m running a project that spawns a bunch of static meshes of cars. Each of these cars has a dynamic material used for paint (from the Automotive materials pack) so they can all have random paint colors.

Now, when I spawn all the cars in a level blueprint, then let the level run then completely reload the level (with a call to the Load Level node) everything works fine. I can run this process as long as I want.

However, to get a performance increase (and increase the size of the level) I stopped reloading the level when I want different car meshes spawned and instead call the Get All Actors of Class node, loop through all the cars and destroy them. I then call the process that respawns all the cars. This also works, but after about 10-15 cycles of this, the project crashes, popping up a window that says “Out of video memory trying to allocate a texture!”

Do I need to explicitly delete all the dynamic materials created when spawning the cars somehow? This whole thing feels like garbage isn’t being collected if I don’t reload the full level (which I’d rather not have to do).

Any help will be appreciated, thanks!

In an attempt to figure out what was filling up the memory to cause my crash, I added a blueprint call to execute the memreport console command. Now I no longer get memory overflow crashes and no indication of what was going wrong in the memory report. As soon as I remove the memreport command, I get out of memory crashes again. So this call clearly does something. (Crash message below)

241025-unrealcrashmessage.png

So my problem is gone, but I don’t understand why. My best guess is that asking for the memory report forced garbage collection that wasn’t happening earlier.

Leaving this open since I have no idea why the memory issue stopped. Thanks!