A poll on video memory for my project.

[rakiru]

If there's a major improvement to be made with using a large amount of VRAM, perhaps having two methods, one that uses lots of VRAM and one that doesn't, would be a good idea? I know very little about graphics programming though, so I don't know how you would use it, and thus I'm not sure how hard it would be to separate the relevant parts and basically write it twice.

[UNITiS]

If there's a major improvement to be made with using a large amount of VRAM, perhaps having two methods, one that uses lots of VRAM and one that doesn't, would be a good idea? I know very little about graphics programming though, so I don't know how you would use it, and thus I'm not sure how hard it would be to separate the relevant parts and basically write it twice.

I'm thinking on redoing the meshing algorithm. It's really greedy right now, adding 2 triangles per visible face of a block. I don't render the faces that are impossible to see, eg. ones that are obstructed by other blocks. I think I will work on combining multiple faces to reduce the vertice and triangle count. This will without any doubt make the game a bit more cpu intensive though. Still worth it though.

[HoboHob]

If there's a major improvement to be made with using a large amount of VRAM, perhaps having two methods, one that uses lots of VRAM and one that doesn't, would be a good idea? I know very little about graphics programming though, so I don't know how you would use it, and thus I'm not sure how hard it would be to separate the relevant parts and basically write it twice.

What I'm guessing is he is storing terrain as a mesh in the video memory. I'm also guessing that it's using a lot of memory (more than 512 MB) for an AoS sized map (that's a lot of geometry).

What he wants to know is if most of the people on this forum graphics cards can handle it. If they can't, he'll fall back and use System Memory.

That's just my guess.

[UNITiS]

What I'm guessing is he is storing terrain as a mesh in the video memory. I'm also guessing that it's using a lot of memory (more than 512 MB) for an AoS sized map (that's a lot of geometry).

What he wants to know is if most of the people on this forum graphics cards can handle it. If they can't, he'll fall back and use System Memory.

That's just my guess.

I don't store the entire map as a mesh. That'd be ridiculous. The game loads parts of terrain, in chunks around the player. Each chunk is a separate mesh. I wanted to know this, to have something to aim for when rewriting the way I render the chunks.

[Toxic_Sloth]

Well... I misread the poll so i guess, when you check the votes - take 1 from 'less than 128' and give it to '512-1gb'

I have around 1300mb video RAM so id rather not push it completely to its limit as it may go over it's capacity...
so yeah 512-1gig would suffice :3

[Chase_UC]

128 MB on an Integrated Intel 945 GPU.