[DSMan195276]

I think it's not really that simple. Clearing buffers certainly isn't free if you're doing it all the time, and considering that high-end gaming already pushes GPU's to their max output, the difference between clearing buffers and not clearing them could be noticeable in the end. Of course, it depends completely on how you implement this and when you go about clearing. For example, if a game allocates a pool of GPU memory at the start and then grabs memory for this pool as it needs it, then the OS clearing the buffers hardly matters. If it's constantly asking and releasing memory though, then the buffer clearing is important. I honestly don't know how the bigger titles handles this, mostly because I don't know exactly how different GPU memory is from CPU memory (And if the pool approach is possible).

What could be an interesting idea is having a 'GPU security switch' on the OS level. If it is set on, then GPU memory buffers are cleared at every release. If it's off, then they're not cleared. My thinking would be that you setup a system in the kernel, somewhat like root access, where by default this switch is on, but a program like a game could suggest that it be turned off for that game to get better performance (And a program like sudo could pop-up with a request box and ask if you want to turn it off, and then ask for the root password to do so). What would be even better is if it could be accomplished on a per-program basis, so only that game's memory isn't zero'd (Which probably isn't that important of memory anyway) and the rest of your program's using the GPU are still zero'd.