What happens if a computer doesn't have enough physical memory to load in all my graphics?
BlitzPlus Forums/BlitzPlus Programming/What happens if a computer doesn't have enough physical memory to load in all my graphics?
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| Does blitz+ automatically manage the files using Windows' virtual memory manager? Or will the program crash? I know you can use the tags at the LoadImage stage but I would like all my graphics to come up as fast as the computer can do it. |
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| Umm, yes and no. -Windows- itself manages loading the files via it's virt mem, all Blitz does is tell Windows it needs to load it. What Windows does with it then, how it manages it, Blitz has no control over. However, from the sounds of it, you actually mean what happens if vidmem is full... in which case, as I understand it, some sort of swap process goes on, if a graphic needs to be blitted something (hopefully a graphic that hasn't been used for a while) will be swapped out of vidmem and the new graphic loaded in. If this happens every frame (ie more than 4mb graphics used on a 4mb vidcard), expect to see some major slowdown. And of course that depends also on the PCI/AGP bus speed... 8xAGP is a wonderful thing. =] |
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| There is a flag in DirectX that is basically "load vid then sys"... it should try video ram first...if that fails, system ram...if that fails...swap space (yuck) But then again, I have seen Windows blue screen by moving the mouse too fast...so, keep your fingers crossed....lol cb |
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| (ie more than 4mb graphics used on a 4mb vidcard), expect to see some major slowdown. And of course that depends also on the PCI/AGP bus speed... 8xAGP is a wonderful thing. =] Except that bottom of the line 8x AGP cards have at least 64, and usually 128, megs of vid ram. If you are swapping that every frame, shame on you! :) |
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| My code is using a good 30-60mb at the moment - i really need to optimise ;] |
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| My code is using a good 30-60mb at the moment - i really need to optimise ;] Eek! Not going down the shareware route, are we? |
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| Not actually =] But that's no excuse... |
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