Quadro card memory leak under per-frame VBO churn

Gaming and Visualization Technologies APIs OpenGL
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1

Hey everybody, I found a pretty severe memory leak on Win11 with a Quadro P4000 when using VBOs. I tried this on other systems and I can’t reproduce it there (tried some AMDs, RTX4xxx and my Thinkpad P15 Gen2 mobile RTX A3000).

Attached is a minimal example that un/binds VBOs and dis/enables VertexAttribArrays on a thread.

This is the part that produces the leak

GLuint vbo = 0;
glGenBuffers(1, &vbo);
glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, vbo);

const float verts[] = {-1.f, -1.f, 1.f, -1.f, -1.f, 1.f,
                        -1.f, 1.f,  1.f, -1.f, 1.f,  1.f};
glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof(verts), verts, GL_STATIC_DRAW);

glEnableVertexAttribArray(0);
glVertexAttribPointer(0, 2, GL_FLOAT, GL_FALSE, 0, (const void *)0);

glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES, 0, 6);

glDisableVertexAttribArray(0);

glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, 0);
glDeleteBuffers(1, &vbo);

Using a wgl debug context prevents the leak on the Quadro machine:

const int attribs[] = { WGL_CONTEXT_MAJOR_VERSION_ARB,
                        1,
                        WGL_CONTEXT_MINOR_VERSION_ARB,
                        0,
                        WGL_CONTEXT_FLAGS_ARB,
                        WGL_CONTEXT_DEBUG_BIT_ARB,
                        0 };
ctx = wglCreateContextAttribsARB(hdc, nullptr, attribs);

Deleaker points to L133 in the main.cpp glDrawArrays(…); calling nvoglv64.dll DrvPresentBuffers that has a final call to KernelBase.dll LocalAlloc

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image1922×992 86.3 KB

This is a screenshot from the attached binary that reproduces the leak

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image1113×625 61.2 KB

This is the same machine with debug context

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image1115×630 71.2 KB

QuadroMemleak.zip (7.7 MB)

NVIDIA System Information 10-28-2025 14-56-45.txt (3.4 KB)

Systeminfo.txt (8.4 KB)

Edit:

One of our users with a Quadro RTX A5000 reported that downgrading to driver v553.62 solved the leak on his side. We only have a limited access to Quadro cards atm - can’t confirm myself.

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I am experiencing a similar issue in an application, on a Quardo P620. I did try running your repro, and my card is showing the same behaviour… GL_VERSION: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 581.15. I will try downgrading my driver to see if this is actually a driver issue and not something in our application.

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3

I can confirm I see this behavior in our application as well, looking in process monitor the Shared GPU memory grows until the driver reports “An application has request more GPU memory than is available in the system”. We can confirm this on Nvidia cards (Quadro P620, RTX A1000). Downgrading to driver version 572.60 or older does not show this behavior.

So this seems like a memory leak introduced in driver version 572.83.

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