Oliver C. wrote: > Couldn't we load the whole data into RAM before? > 1 GB Ram are cheap today.
It's not nearly that simple. If you want to draw something on the screen, it has to get into the video card's memory at some point during the frame. Even 256MB Übercards are going to thrash* with a 1GB texture set. You end up being limited by the DMA bandwidth over the AGP bus, which is much lower than the memory bandwidth of the DDR SDRAM on the card (for lots of reasons, including the need to transfer higher mipmaps that wouldn't be sampled by the actual texturing operation). Andy * In this context, thrash means having to swap textures many times each frame. It's a performance condition exactly analagous to virtual memory thrashing via disk swap. Andy _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
