[sldev] How to live on 4kb of t-mem.

[Alan Grimes]

I was playing around with the stats bar to see exactly how slow my comp
was and what I need to upgrade next to get it up to speed.

I GET 4 FPS, ON A GOOD DAY,
1.5 FPS, WHEN OTHER AVS ARE PRESENT!!

I think I'm seeing texture memory exhaustion, it reports GL memory "100"
which I ASSUME MEANS PERCENTAGE!!!, sometimes going up to 120 or more.

This implies that I'm seeing a massive video ram thrashing over my
computer's AGP 4X bus.

This is utterly confounding because I have 128 mb of video ram, or more
than a billion bits worth of memory...

Both the playstation 2 and nintendo game CUBE, generally look better
than second life in most regards. Neither of them can bost more than 40
mb of total memory. The N64 had no more than 8mb of ram.

What the hell is going on then?

important>>>>
Well, what the N64 did, a machine I studied in considerable depth, is
delay the color-space expansion until the very last possible instant.
<<< important!

What it would do is load several 1-bit, and 4-bit color-mapped bitmaps
into the 4k texture memory and then composite these into the 16-bit buffer.

When I tried to upload a 1-bit texture to second life, the first thing
the server did was convert it into a blurry 24/32 bit image. Thusly,
second life is between 8 and 32 times less efficient in terms of memory,
bandwidth, and disk space than the N64. =\

For a good time, press and hold the squat key, (pg dn), walk a short
ways then keep holding down page-dn. =P


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