DDS question
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/DDS question
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| Are DDS textures always loaded into vidmem? (Could be that's why they're killing my old 64mb-gfx laptop.) Last edited 2011 |
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| Not until there are drawn i'm sure. I had some weird result with testing textures though. They seemed to shift back and forth between RAM and VRAM. Only the force VRAM flag seemed to keep them there. Things might have changed since the last time I tested it though. |
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| I would say its not upto handling the decompression on the fly especially if its 64MB shared memory with system RAM. |
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| Ross - I thought the point was that they were held in compressed format in vidmem and decompressed on the fly as needed. This seems to be what Rroff is saying. The point is that vidmem is now full, and the graphics card has 'no elbow-room' for its actual calculations, hence my 1 FPS. I've just done a quick test - converted all my buildings back to jpg, and I'm now getting 3 to 5 FPS, with at least some little AvailVidMem showing. So I think I'll go ahead and convert all my models back to jpg. All opinions are welcome. |
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| Depends what your target hardware is I guess. For any modern PC DDS is a lot better. On a related note I notice the latest version of pant.net can output DDS in DXT5 format with interpolated alpha :D you may also find playing with the different DXT formats for DDS files that some settings will produce better results on the laptop. Last edited 2011 |
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| Target hardware is the local archeological society - mum and dad enthusiasts. What do you think. ;) Unlikely that they've got gamers' machines. I'll be lucky if they have 3D-capability at all! Still at that point, that's their problem; I'll have done my best. One last question: Am I right that the file-type (png, jpg, bmp) only matters for storage/downloading etc, that once a texture is in memory it will always take up the same amount? |
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| Yep. Unless it's dds, it will be decompressed into a raw bitmap. |
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| I would probably avoid DDS then with that target audience - good chance some of them have GPUs that don't even properly support DXT assuming they have 3D acceleration at all. Prolly best bet would be using png with compression to reduce disc storage space. Last edited 2011 |
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| Thanks, guys. Agreed on both points. I think I really have hit the point where if they say 'It's a bit slow.' then I'll recommend that they get a better PC/graphics card/more memory. |
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| You could try going with a 16 bit graphics window and converting your png's to 16 bit. It will recude the amount of VRAM you use. |
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| Well, at the moment all DDS's have been converted to JPG, and no textures are being loaded to vram. I'm still getting around 5 FPS on this old machine, and AvailVidMem is down to less than 1 mb. So I guess Rroff's comment "especially if its 64MB shared memory with system RAM" must be true - Windows is grabbing some of the vram. Well, MS are like that, aren't they. |
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