What programs actually use the memory on a Graphics card?

Interesting. Here's my i7 M295X after a fresh reboot, just running Mail and iTunes in the background, and a couple of Safari tabs with no video running.

 

I have a m290x as well, and istatMenus doesn't seem to show much, if any VRAM usage. I think it's a bug with iStatMenus. It would be an enormous help if I could rely on this utility to help me configure graphics options, but I think that it's inaccurate for both m290x and m295x cards. The frames per second jumps around a lot, from 3.7 to 37 fps when I'm just running the basic Safari, Mail, Finder configuration.

On the other hand, I tried running the company of heroes benchmark (at 1024*768; ultra settings, windowed, so that I could pay attention to istat menus, and got 336 max, 161 avg, 68 min), which seemed to correlate with ista's fps indicator, at least somewhat.

 

Sorry for the off topic.
Is it possible to have a screenshot showing istat's temps under similar conditions?

 

Imho the 4 gb of the m295x are alone worth the upgrade especially if you 're using an additional external display.
iMac alone has a lot of pixels to process and the specs for software are always going higher.

I also think that these video editing programs are using during processing the video ram and if it's not enough, they crash especially with the current high video resolutions.

 

Supposedly you can use the OpenGL Monitor to figure this out. It's an optional bit of XCode.
the manual states:

Current Video Memory in Use

The total number of bytes of VRAM in use. This parameter is vendor specific and not available for all drivers. vramUsedBytes​

 

I know the performance of Apple Motion is highly dependent on the GPU.

 

Bare Feats has a direct comparison. Seems to me that CPU plays a bigger role than GPU on the pro apps.

http://barefeats.com/imac5k6.html

I have no expertise in premiere, but in After Effects it has been my observation that the best way to make it faster is to throw RAM at it.

 

The thing about bare feats is that, they typically compare an i7/m295x with an i5/m290x, so there's no way to break it down.

And even if they compare video cards, it's typically (D300/4 core, D500/6 core, D700, 8 core), a least for the After Effects benchmarks. Maddening.