Question about video memory

I was just wondering what would happen if you exceeded the storage capacity of your vid memory? Would there be a substantial loss of performance?

I am guessing the textures would be dynamically loaded from the HD as needed but that is obviously slow.

Thanks guys,
-Jeremy

 

Texture loading from the HD? fuggedaboutit :wink:
(that's an amaerican gangster saying for the international crowd)

This kind of dynamic loading has to do with portals and BSP trees right?

I think when you're GFX card runs out of VRAM it automatically self destructs and spits out a MapQuest to your nearest computer store for an upgrade.

Sorry, any serious replies?

 

When the GFX card runs out of video memory, the textures are copied from main RAM to video mem just before use. This means that you can easily have 128MB worth of textures in a single level, while still running on a 64MB card. BUT if you have 128MB of textures IN VIEW, then you're gonna pay a price.

That being said, last I checked, the system can throw about 4GB/s to the gfx card. and it's probably not getting slower ;-)

My advice is to not worry about until you're a few months away from shipping. Texture.masterTextureLimit will get you a long way, and most likely, download size will be your main concern anyways.

 

aNTeNNa trEE: Get some sleep man you are getting punchy

nicholas: Great, thanks for the info, nice to know I can overload it a bit.

-Jeremy