14mb is nothing for a full game, sure, but again I just started this game a couple of weeks ago; there aren't many graphics in it, and what is there is *tiny*.
I use a level editor, and intend to paste loaded tiles to a rather large canvas before deleting them, so that canvas itself is going to take up a good chunk of VRAM. I might even use 2. What I'm getting at is by the time all of the graphics and everything have been added, I'll probably have ~50mb VRAM without any window scaling. With this method of window scaling, VRAM will be soaring into the hundreds.
Sorry, but I don't know what you mean about the pillarboxes. All I'm doing is increasing display resolution, layout size, and zoom rates, then setting the scroll X/Y. There are no pillar boxes, just a larger window.
I just tried using MagiCam's zoom instead of System Zoom. I thought that would keep the VRAM from increasing, but it only helps a little bit; I get 9mb instead of 14. Odd.