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Jun 6, 2006, 7:27pm

The past week, while AW was having troubles and building was disabled, I got
back into playing Oblivion, a modern PC RPG game. Along with this, I was
fascinated by the "AWE" equivalents available for oblivion. These are large,
60MB+ download texture packs which sport 1024 and even 2048, and in some
cases even 4096 version textures for common outdoor textures in the game.
Most of oblivion's textures are by default 512x512, whereas most of AWE's
textures are 256 with default AW at 128.

Along with these texture packs there are communities of modders which were
discussing the technical limitations of such high res textures. The claims
are universal, and should hold true for any 3d windows app.

As I always suspected, it's indeed true that there is zero performance hit
using high res textures so long as your video card has enough Video RAM to
hold it all. However, even it does run out memory, it merely overflows into
the system memory instead. When this happens, you won't notice an overall
drop in fps but instead stuttering as you move from area to area, or turn
around.

If anyone reading this is a professional in how the computer handles VRAM
overflow and can offer further information, please do so.

Anyway, this led me to wonder how much is "enough Video RAM". So I
downloaded a handy lil' tool called Video Memory Watcher. As the name
suggests, it monitors video RAM represented in a bar graph. Time for some
benchmarks!

In my tests I kept my vis at 120m, and stood still while everything loaded
and checked for memory usage. In each area, I would set the benchmark
standing point as my home and restart the browser, so I'd get a clean memory
bank for each new area.
I chose 120m vis because I figure that if you can operate and use 160-200m
vis in a developed area, then it's likely you have a pretty modern computer
with a 256MB video card.

-------

Standing at SW City GZ at 120m vis, facing west
Town square park is a high density area with many textures and details.
There are also TONS of images in the area which count towards video usage.

With AWE: 55MB
Without AWE: 49MB

Standing at East Ending at 120m vis, facing southeast
East Ending is an urban area, packed with buildings and details.

With AWE: 53MB
Without AWE: 45MB

Standing at central Orton Strip Mall at 120m vis facing east
Orton is infamous as one of the laggiest places in AW, and quite likely the
laggiest spot in SW City anyway. It's pretty unlikely anyone would be going
there here at 120m vis though lol.

With AWE: 67MB
Without AWE: 54MB

Standing at SW City Ballpark at 120m vis facing west
The above tests all take place in highly dense areas of town. The ballpark
area would closer resemble a more average density area you'd come across in
AW.

With AWE: 33MB
Without AWE: 23MB

Standing at AWGZ at 120m vis facing north
Last but not least here's the ol' world GZ.

With AWE: 48MB
Without AWE: 38MB

-------

Well I think that's all the tests we need. It covered highly developed and
dense areas as well as average areas. So it looks like your typical build
scene is only going to be using something around 10MB more video RAM with
AWE. In any case, a 64MB video card would be fine for AW. If you crank you
vis way up high, you'll want a 128MB though.

The point of this topic wasn't to promote AWE though. It's more of a
shoutout to world owners to not be so conservative with your textures. You
have plenty of headroom! Any video card newer than 2002 should have 64MB or
more video RAM. Seeing as how its mid-2006 now, it's only fair for AW to try
its best to keep up with the PC industry. As such, AWE 2.0 will be catering
to the 128MB and 256MB video card users. Textures will be further heightened
to 512 and 1024MB resolutions.

If your world is using the AW object path and your interested in using
higher res textures, your welcome to upgrade your OP to AWE 1.4 content. The
zip is setup here at www.swcity.net/files/awe/AWE.zip and you can read what
exactly you'll be changing here
http://www.swcity.net/files/awe/readme_1.4.txt

PS. minor note - I noticed a slightly higher FPS using AWE during the tests,
because of the cleaned up objects in the OP. About 3-5% faster.

Jun 7, 2006, 1:48pm

Textures that are too large might not display in all AW though, I do not
know presently the borderline, but it should be 1024 or 2048. Also,
pictures do not display on picture objects when they are too large.

For terrain it is indeed preferably to use the biggest size possible,
since it reduces the stretching on height differences or the pixeelation
and fuzziness and enables very detailled terrain too (even more now,
with 512 terrains possible).


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Jun 7, 2006, 3:41pm

Need less "mights" and more absolutes ;) Should look into it.
Right now I've just did some tests. 1028 and 2048 work fine. 4096 and
beyond don't, though. Not that you'd need a resolution that high...

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Jun 7, 2006, 6:07pm

Well, I did not know it exactly and for all versions <g>, all I knew
there was some frontier up to which textures and pictures displayed, I
discovered it once and then decided only to make textures of up to
1024*1024 and did not store the exact maximum size in my memory. :-)

In fact, when ones graphic card is too small in memory, it can happen
that they cannot see textures of higher sizes either. 1024*1024 should
be a safe size, though.

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