On Thursday, February 21, 2013 10:31:18 Renk Thorsten wrote: > > I was not referring to a frame rate issue, but FG running out of memory. > > > > http://www.flightgear.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=18913&p=177392#p17739 > > 2 > > > > It is rare to see that happening using the current scenery, but here if I > > select random buildings and objects with a high value for trees, I can > > get Win32 to run out of memory. Apparently at least one other user has a > > problem. > > I do not doubt that you can make FG run out of memory on a 32 bit system > (you can also do it on a 64 bit system if you try really hard). My point is > more that memory issues should be dealt with by eliminating the root cause, > i.e. by switching off random buildings and trees on a low memory system and > by not using hires textures, not by reducing visibility to low values. > Compared to the memory footprint coming from high-detail aircraft and > random buildings, the effect of 10 km vs 20 km visibility on memory is > negligible. We have aircraft in the repository which fill more than 300 MB > of GPU memory - loading terrain vertices worth 20 km is a very small > fraction of that, even in hires scenery. Even in custom Italy with 50 km > visibility, I had about half a million of terrain vertices in the scene, > that's 1.5 million or so numbers. That's the order of magnitude of a > good-sized texture sheet - 1024x1024 has about a million numbers - with a > lower precision, but with added mipmapping,... > > * Thorsten
Draw distance and, consequently, fog used to mask the edge, has always been used as a device to limit graphics workload, resources needed, and improve performance of 3d applications. It allows you to fill the visible scene with as much detail as you can handle, and provides a fairly gracious and credible way of hiding the cutoff. And this technique isn't going away soon. And this is exactly the case of decent GPUs stuck on a limited memory system (be they 32bit or low memory ones), they can handle all the goodies in a limited scene (maybe even more), but their memory can't hold the wide scenes. Why should those users be forced to give up on those goodies just because one part of the rendering scheme doesn't want to play by the rules? Even more so when there's no indication that happens... The default max visibility value is a pretty sane default, and simply increasing that to huge values without any kind of warning of the implications provided to the unaware user is simply _BAD_DESIGN_ imho. (As is disabling the z/Z key behaviour in one of the weather options, again without any warning provided whatsoever). Cheers, Emilian ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_feb _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel