[Zaxtor]

I think my ram is clocked at 1333 MHZ and is DDR3 8GB from x2 4 GB chips.
What if I put 16GB ram (max for Windows 7 Home premium 64bit) and DDR3 clocked at 1600 mhz or up?
What kind of improvement it will do.

I know Eduke32 can lag if my ram goes low,
I total ranging 6.0 to 6.4GB of ram out of 8.192GB

My other friend said 8GB is low for today standard.

[Kyanos]

I rock polymer with just 4 gigs ram. Video card memory was where my PC bottle necked. I bought a decent $100ish nividia card with 2GB ram on the card, it made a big difference for me in EDuke32 performance.

[Inspector Lagomorf]

Zaxtor, on 20 April 2016 - 04:21 AM, said:

My other friend said 8GB is low for today standard.

Only if you're running lots of VMs, or enterprise applications like AutoCAD or Adobe Premiere. 8GB is plenty otherwise.

[Zaxtor]

I know video card can be a factor.



Drek what type of ram you use.?
If you use DDR4 and high clocked ram, your PC would run faster.
Also your processor and vid card can be a factor.
I know better vid card, means better performance.

My vid card is those one integrated into the processor but has slots to add vid cards better than on processor.

[Zaxtor]

PS
I think is my videocard integrated into my processor.
Is it considered a good card?
I dunno much about vid cards tho.
My processor is ~3.9 GHZ quad-core

[Kyanos]

4gig DDR 2 with a Intel Core 2 Duo processor an older PC

Your amd card is probably the issue. EDuke is much better on nividia cards. I would think a cheap nividia card will bring you much better performance than more RAM.

[icecoldduke]

Zaxtor, on 20 April 2016 - 04:21 AM, said:

I know Eduke32 can lag if my ram goes low,
I total ranging 6.0 to 6.4GB of ram out of 8.192GB

What kind of bad things are you doing to Eduke32 to make it use 6gb of ram .

[Zaxtor]

I think is 64bit usage cus my windows is 64b.
standard 800x600 res
maximum quality texture setting in Eduke
And etc.

My mod also have 2 folder of Models.

One lower quality etc for ppl with slower machines and one with high quality for faster machines.

Texture with lower quality is like more than 50% smaller in size than higher quality. Many textures smaller in size(diameter) and mostly indexted colors.
So if we install the lower quality we rename folder "models_low_res" to "models"
of course the high res "models" must not be in same folder as low res if you play with low res.

[Mark]

Adding tons of higher res assets really increases ram usage. This was brought up in another thread but I'll repeat it here. For the Decay TC we had to knock down quality of many assets because people like me with 32 bit OS's and 4GB ram limits would run out of ram and crash. In Vista, after the OS and everything else is loaded the user is left with only 2-2.1GB of ram. To compensate for that lack of ram I had another 2GB of virtual memory in Windows. I was still getting out of memory crashes when trying to run through all the maps in one run. Since it made proper beta testing impossible and probrems for other people with older systems we decided to optimize ( downsize ) many assets. There were only a few models that used normal map textures but if we had chosen to use normal and spec maps for all models we really would have been in a bad way.

[blizzart]

Zaxtor, on 20 April 2016 - 05:50 AM, said:

PS
I think is my videocard integrated into my processor.
Is it considered a good card?
I dunno much about vid cards tho.
My processor is ~3.9 GHZ quad-core

I think the problem will be, that your graphics chip is also using your total RAM.

For me, I´m using a i5 @ 2,4 GHz and a multimedia nVidia Card with 2GB RAM and 8GB RAM on my notebook and never ever run into that big issues with my Brute Force mod.
There I´m using thousands of hires textures (the texture cache file has a size of over 1GB from time to time) and even polymer lights and TROR don´t let the game lag that much that it is unplayable.

[icecoldduke]

Mark., on 21 April 2016 - 03:33 AM, said:

Adding tons of higher res assets really increases ram usage. This was brought up in another thread but I'll repeat it here. For the Decay TC we had to knock down quality of many assets because people like me with 32 bit OS's and 4GB ram limits would run out of ram and crash. In Vista, after the OS and everything else is loaded the user is left with only 2-2.1GB of ram. To compensate for that lack of ram I had another 2GB of virtual memory in Windows. I was still getting out of memory crashes when trying to run through all the maps in one run. Since it made proper beta testing impossible and probrems for other people with older systems we decided to optimize ( downsize ) many assets. There were only a few models that used normal map textures but if we had chosen to use normal and spec maps for all models we really would have been in a bad way.

Are you using textures that are bigger then 2048x2048, most of your textures should be 1024x1024 or even 512x512. The player really isn't going to be looking close up at your pretty rock textures to notice any pixel errors. The engine does do some stupid stuff, but really 4gb of assets?

I promise in PolymerNG if the texture streamer can't get all of your textures loaded in in one frame I will render your textures a nice magenta color.

[Hendricks266]

icecoldduke, on 21 April 2016 - 04:34 AM, said:

I promise in PolymerNG if the texture streamer can't get all of your textures loaded in in one frame I will render your textures a nice magenta color.

Would it work to load the 8-bit ART tile as a first fallback option, so it doesn't look too horrendous? TX mentioned that idea a number of years ago with respect to splitting image loading and decoding into a separate thread.

[icecoldduke]

Hendricks266, on 21 April 2016 - 04:54 AM, said:

Would it work to load the 8-bit ART tile as a first fallback option, so it doesn't look too horrendous? TX mentioned that idea a number of years ago with respect to splitting image loading and decoding into a separate thread.

The point is for it to look as horrendous as possible so content guys go in and fix there overly high res assets. I plan on having the engine load in a middle range mip first then load in the highest quality mip, if the middle range mip fails to load because there is too much work, then your texture becomes a nice magenta. I could make it load the lowest quality mip first but then you will get texture popping like in RAGE, and that is just silly.

[icecoldduke]

Hendricks266, on 21 April 2016 - 04:54 AM, said:

Would it work to load the 8-bit ART tile as a first fallback option, so it doesn't look too horrendous? TX mentioned that idea a number of years ago with respect to splitting image loading and decoding into a separate thread.

The point is for it to look as horrendous as possible so content guys go in and fix there overly high res assets. I plan on having the engine load in a middle range mip(0.5 * the requested mip) first then load in the highest quality requested mip, if the middle range mip fails to load because there is too much work, then your texture becomes a nice magenta. I could make it load the lowest quality mip first but then you will get texture popping like in RAGE, and that is just silly.

[Hendricks266]

It seems like that would be overly machine dependent, and should therefore be configurable. Maybe that should be the default behavior in some sort of developer mode, but an end-user should never see magenta even if the developer did something wrong. See: the years of threads asking us about white boxes running Polymost with ATI's crap drivers until we implemented a workaround.

Or maybe the author wants the highres stuff, no compromises, and you'll need to run the mod from an SSD with fast RAM.

[icecoldduke]

Hendricks266, on 21 April 2016 - 05:05 AM, said:

It seems like that would be overly machine dependent, and should therefore be configurable. Maybe that should be the default behavior in some sort of developer mode, but an end-user should never see magenta even if the developer did something wrong. See: the years of threads asking us about white boxes running Polymost with ATI's crap drivers until we implemented a workaround.

Or maybe the author wants the highres stuff, no compromises, and you'll need to run the mod from an SSD with fast RAM.

I thought about having some kind of developer mode, but I want something that content developers can not turn off. I was playing around with the idea of a production mode that could only load optimized assets, packaged assets; then in that mode the magenta color wouldn't occur. The idea is I want to prevent content developers from over taxing the system. There is no excuse why Duke mods have 4gb of assets loaded at one time. The only way I know of to force content guys to do stuff properly is do bad things to there assets and make them address the issue.

When making tech you have to learn to force content guys to work within the confines of the tech and supported hardware. Content guys will throw some kind of a fit, but eventually they will see the light and will make awesome stuff.

[Mark]

icecoldduke, on 21 April 2016 - 04:34 AM, said:

Are you using textures that are bigger then 2048x2048, most of your textures should be 1024x1024 or even 512x512. The player really isn't going to be looking close up at your pretty rock textures to notice any pixel errors. The engine does do some stupid stuff, but really 4gb of assets?

I promise in PolymerNG if the texture streamer can't get all of your textures loaded in in one frame I will render your textures a nice magenta color.

I'm pretty sure most textures were 512 x 512 or less.

[Zaxtor]

Also it depends the size of the texture "bytes, color and size wise"
Also more colors means more in size.. as for RGB. Smaller for Indexed colors
You can make something 8196 x 512 indexed and takes around 112KB,
But if is 512x8196 it would be bigger in size... Seems higher in vertical makes the file larger than longer in horizontal.

If let say you have a RGB texture that is 6000x700 4024KB and you rotate it 700x6000, it will take 8205KB, more than double in size which is weird.
When file is same size except diff position.

[icecoldduke]

Zaxtor, on 21 April 2016 - 03:01 PM, said:

Also it depends the size of the texture "bytes, color and size wise"
Also more colors means more in size.. as for RGB. Smaller for Indexed colors
You can make something 8196 x 512 indexed and takes around 112KB,
But if is 512x8196 it would be bigger in size... Seems higher in vertical makes the file larger than longer in horizontal.

If let say you have a RGB texture that is 6000x700 4024KB and you rotate it 700x6000, it will take 8205KB, more than double in size which is weird.
When file is same size except diff position.

I'm assuming you are using PNG's? Remember PNG's are compressed data, right now I don't care about the size of the image on disk, only what gets loaded into memory. The raw data for a 8196x512 image is 12mb without alpha, with alpha its 16mb!!! With DXT compression your texture sizes will be smaller(I don't know the cirumstances were Eduke32 uses DXT compression if it does at all). Why the hell do you need a texture that has a 8196 width? Are you future proofing your game for 8k screens?

[Zaxtor]

Textures in Editart are max 512 wide mostly 256 or less but png are bigger.
Some of them are stretched to make it look bigger.

let say you have a bridge that takes many sprites.
instead of making many sprites you make few 512x32 or so and you stretch it.
is like several sprites in 1.

Png is like 8196x64 example

So you save sprites, less sprites on screen.

most of my textures are png, few are jpg.
like a dozen are gif but very small gif.

[Zaxtor]

Example.
Lots of my levels would have too close of sprite limits.
So I (merge sprites into long one) for massively long bridge, sprite works etc.
I save 100s to 1000s sprites.

[icecoldduke]

Do what Drek said.

[Kyanos]

Repeating the texture in the image file like that is very inefficient, to put it nicely.

A model, a simple plane can repeat the texture like that using texture wrap uv co-ordinates and act as a sprite in game. All for about 3kb.

[icecoldduke]

Drek, on 21 April 2016 - 07:55 PM, said:

Repeating the texture in the image file like that is very inefficient, to put it nicely.

A model, a simple plane can repeat the texture like that using texture wrap uv co-ordinates and act as a sprite in game. All for about 3kb.

Exactly. This is kind of thing is the reason why, the nice magenta color and/or quater resing all of your images if I detect stupid shit, will help in the grand scheme of things. . 4gb of loaded data won't run on the Xbox one.

[Zaxtor]

I would do a split if run low.
But most of my level has thousands of "free sprite slot" so when stuff spawns such as debris, enemies etc, doesn;t overload the game.

Last level is split in 2 cus is.
Long, complex etc.
mostly will run low in sector before sprites.
Sprite count is about 10k.

[icecoldduke]

I for see a lot of magenta in your future. If you don't want your pretty assets to look like this image in PolymerNG, stop doing bad things .

[Mike Norvak]

Drek, on 21 April 2016 - 07:55 PM, said:

A model, a simple plane can repeat the texture like that using texture wrap uv co-ordinates and act as a sprite in game. All for about 3kb.

This.

[Tea Monster]

You guys are forgetting P.A.D. though

In all seriousness, if we are supplying TGA's, how are we going to calculate the memory footprint for the engine's generated textures?

[icecoldduke]

Tea Monster, on 22 April 2016 - 12:23 AM, said:

You guys are forgetting P.A.D. though

In all seriousness, if we are supplying TGA's, how are we going to calculate the memory footprint for the engine's generated textures?

Your TGA's won't ever stay resident inside of the engine. Your textures won't have a memory footprint. Instead 128x128 region's of your image will be uploaded into a giant quilt and only preserved as long as that region is on the screen. You still have to worry about how big your images our because the engine will have to pull that data of the harddrive before it's needed. If the data doesn't make it through the pipeline in time, because you have over taxed the system, then I have to either use the lowest quality mip, or force you to deal with the issue. I choose to force you to deal with the issue.

I'll have more info soon on what the through put rate of the system will be, so you guys know how to build content. The general guideline is, 512x512 to 1024x1024 is good for most things. Things the player will be focusing on a lot, like monsters, 2048x2048 is fine. Don't go bigger.

I will have debug text show how much texture through put there is, and have warnings if you guys are getting close to the cap.

Please understand I want everyone to be able to build great content with PolymerNG, if you feel you want higher res textures please consult me. I'm asking you guys to trust me .

[Person of Color]

It's consuming that RAM in self defense. If it doesn't allocate it Randy Pitchford might try to claim it as his own.