On Mon, 20 Jan 2003, Fabio Alemagna wrote: > On Mon, 20 Jan 2003, Jos Hulzink wrote: > > Why should you backup the whole gfx board's memory? Isn't there any way to > back up only the area actually used by the application? > > You know, Amigas deal with full screen graphics and swappable screens > perfectly since they're born, even with gfx cards.
Good old Amiga... yes you can, but as you see memory is really growing too fast. Say I run Unreal Tournament 2003 on both console 1 and 2. I run 1280x1024 true colour with 32 bit Z buffer, the rest of the memory is filled with textures, and if I had 64 MB instead of 32, it would have filled those too. UT 2003 isn't that small itself, so it takes 64 MB of main memory already. What should I do when I switch console ? Out of memory error: you are not allowed to swich console untill you quit this program ? Swap Unreal to disk ? I wanna bet Amigas didn't save the framebuffer unless the amount of memory needed was much smaller than the amount of memory available. Besides, the software mapped to the background will still consume cpu power needed for the foreground task, and it only helps applications that use unaccellerated framebuffer access. Other apps will be blocked immediately by the accellerator. Think about the amount of software that will be. Best regards, Jos
