[sldev] Texture Cache: A summary of The Plan as it stands

[Buckaroo Mu]

Dahlia Trimble wrote:
> Some initial technical thoughts...
>  
> I suspect that there may be quite a few factors that affect the speed 
> of retrieving raw image data from a hard disk, the operating system 
> and file systems in use, whether disk compression is in place, the 
> transfer rate and seek time of the disk hardware, the size and 
> efficiency of the disk cache, how badly fragmented the drive is, how 
> many other processes on the machine are competing for disk access....
I would believe that except for the experimentation I did with a 
ramdisk. Caching from a 1GB ramdisk, which effectively removes every 
proposed bottleneck, resulted in no perceptible increase in texture 
rendering whatsoever. Multiple cores & CPUs may very well lead to faster 
decoding, but it will still be the biggest factor.

(If you missed my comments about that experiment, I upgraded my PC from 
1.5GB to 3GB - so even with a 1GB ramdisk, effective usable memory went 
up by .5GB. The cache folder, set to a /cache folder on the ramdisk, did 
work as well as a normal drive - but did not show the improvement I 
would expect given the stupendous increase in access time and transfer 
speed.)

-Buckaroo Mu