Here is how textures are dealt with under OpenGL and hardware accelerators. This can obviously change in the future, but right now, I am fairly certain that the info is correct (I make games in my day job, so I have vested interest in this :-)
The amount of memory (VRAM) on the card (12mb for Voodoo2, 16mb for TNT, 64mb for GeForce2, etc) is used for both textures (TRAM) and frame buffer space. If you have a large rendering window, like 1600x1200, it will take up 1600x1200x4x3 in 32-bit mode with double buffering and a Z buffer (or 23mb). Most people run at TV resolution, like NTSC, so it takes 640x480x4x3 = 3.7mb All of the space left is for textures onboard the card (FYI, if you have heard that people are having problems with the PlayStation2, notice that it only has 4mb of VRAM...not much onboard texture space, huh? :-)
Sooo, when GEM "creates" a texture, it immediately tries to send the texture to the card, which uses some of the left over space in the VRAM. If you had a 640x480 window on a Voodoo2, you have ~8mb of texture space left over. On a GeForce2, ~60mb. The problem is what happens if you want more textures than can fit into TRAM. OpenGL requires that the video drivers deal with the problem, so GEM doesn't care too much (more about this later). In most cases, the drivers cache the textures in main memory and if a texture is requested for rendering and it isn't resident on the card, it will download it. If you have AGP, then this is pretty quick, although none of 3dfx cards really take advantage of this (ie, those cards are about the same speed as the PCI bus). So depending on the number of textures, and how complex the scene is, you might be able to display more textures than you have TRAM.
One slowdown that can happen with GEM is that it makes a copy of the image before sending it down the chain of objects. If you are constantly changing images with a pix_multiimage, this can be a performance hit, but you can modify the actual pixel data with the pix objects. The pixels aren't sent to the graphics card until the pix_texture object is reached.
GEM tries to help with this with a few objects. pix_imageInPlace acts much the same as pix_multiimage, but it downloads _every_ image in the sequence to the card when a download message is recieved. It also immediately turns on texturing, instead of making a copy (ie, you don't need a pix_texture object). Much faster, but not as flexible. pix_movie does much the same thing. It sends the pixel data without copying it if there is a new frame to display.
The entire pix system uses a caching system so that the copying and processing only occurs if something actually changes. For example, if you had a pix_threshold object, it would only process when rendering started...and every time that the values actually changed. You can use pix_buf to isolate parts which don't change from those that do, but it involves another copy.
On the Voodoo2, the hardware itself limits textures to 256x256...this will never change. The newest Voodoo5 boards have a higher texture size.
Hope this helps...this message was a lot longer than I had expected.
Later, Mark
============================ = mdanks@stormfront.com = Lead Programmer PS2 = http://www.danks.org/mark ============================
-----Original Message----- From: Linium [mailto:intent@club-internet.fr] Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2000 3:24 AM To: pd-list@iem.mhsg.ac.at Subject: Re: Gem and texture size
Mark Danks a écrit :
If you are using a 3dfx Voodoo based card, it has a
maximum texture size
of 256x256.
For everyone on the list, I _highly_ recommend using
nVidia's products.
Their OpenGL support is great.
Later, Mark
Yes, I have a Voodoo2.
Are the textures stored in the onboard memory (12mb here) ? And does this limit the number of textures that can be displayed at the same time ?
Thx for your attention,
Linium