Damn it! Don''t bother: just use S3TC texture compression!

Y.

translation :
incoming : use S3TC Texture Compression
translated : use S3 Texture Compression Texture Compression...

What about learning the acronyms ?

-* So many things to do, so little time to spend. *-

Ysaneya: paletted textures look WAYS better than S3TC. I think no one should use s3tc, it has good compression, but it just looks bad, especially on photorealistic textures (and since he's doing terrains, thats probably what he's using)

Edit: Penetrator, if you have enough RAM, you are using a decent texture handling system and you don't need more than 32MB of textures per frame, then 200MB textures shouldn't be a problem at all. Just bind a limited number of textures in OpenGL, just enough to fill the 32MB of your GeForce (make sure they are all resident). Now you'll have to code a priority system that chooses the appropriate textures out of your 200MB set and update them using glTexSubImage2D(). Be sure to remap the texture ID's of your faces. If there isn't too much texture changes from one frame to the next, the updating will be quite low, and the framerate high. This system has been used by SGI on their experimental flight simulator 'Eclipse', that uses over 10GB of textures...


A.H aka Blueshift


Edited by - Blueshift on July 11, 2001 10:39:07 AM

This is actually an interesting topic; I think I have a decent grasp on the basics of OpenGL, but this nasty thing called the ''real world'' keeps popping its head up. I was surprised to learn, for example, that I didn''t have infinite video card memory.

E.G., after a while, I stumbled onto the fact my framerate dropped when I kept binding a new texture with each polygon draw. The solution to this is straightforward, once you identify the problem, but Mom never told me about this gritty stuff I have to worry about with OpenGL/3D programming. Anyone have any tips/links they could share, on similar gotchas?

Thanks,
Thomas

thanks to all of you for your precious advices ! I just started with 1024 textures of 128x128 , for a total of about 60Mbytes. Since my terrain is culled, no more than 128 textures are handled at the same time, and fps are 140+ (on a 1.2Ghz Athlon, 256Mb ram, Geforce3, no vsync). Now i''ll try to use 256x256pixels textures, for a total amount of more than 200mbytes, and see what happens: but since terrain is culled, i suppose fps will be always good; only preloading all the 200 mbytes of textures will take a couple of minutes ...

you can see some of my work at www.web-discovery.net

bye



glHorizon_Project



www.web-discovery.net

but one thing i still don''t understand is: if i load more than 32mbytes of texture, exceeding vga card capabilities, does opengl use system memory or do i get a sort of overflow error ?

glHorizon_Project



www.web-discovery.net

AFAIK it will just put them in system memory. Not sure what happens when it runs out of that...Using virtual memory for textures doesn''t sound like a good idea.

FatalXC