Hi,
On Saturday, April 14, 2012 13:51:33 ThorstenB wrote:
> On 14.04.2012 13:08, Stuart Buchanan wrote:
> > I like the idea of resizing textures at model loading time a lot.
> >
> > The other option would be to switch the shader off. Presumably that
> > would not load the normal map into the GPU.
>
> Shader textures are loaded unconditionally, at least into main memory.
> Hopefully GPU loading is optional - but I'm not sure.
Textures are loaded in main memory when the model that references them is
loaded. Handing textures over to OpenGL is done once they are rendered the
first time. Then the driver decides when to put the buffers in which area of
the
gpu/cpu memory. You cant control this then. And I think you should not try to
control this last part mostly since this highly interacts with paging, uses of
the GPU by other applications and so on. So this really belongs hidden into
the driver and interacting with the system.
> If someone was looking into improving the effect/texture loading code:
> it would be great if loading shader textures could be made optional,
> i.e. defer loading them until first access.
Well, what do you mean with 'first access'?
> As a hard work-around, we could also introduce a new command-line option
> to disable shaders support completely (enabling shaders at run-time via
> the dialog wouldn't work then). This would help those with weak GPUs/old
> systems - and reduce loading times and memory consumption.
That's actually something I consider having. Also for different reasons. All
the shader stuff is really nice but there are really use cases out there where
it does not matter if the chrome is glossy or not. For them it's really most
important that you get stable 60hz in *any* case. Which is still easier to get
using the fixed function pipeline.
So again still having that available would be good IMO.
Greetings
Mathias
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