Well maybe this explains something that's been furrowing my brow for a few days.......

 

Reading The P3D forums and hearing all the recommendations for 4gb graphics cards and descriptions of huge amounts of Vram being sucked up by the sim, I've been wondering what the flying heck was eating all o' the memory!!!

 

Maybe this helps explain it a bit, since I cant really see why P3d would just inherently eat that much more ram than FSX.......  :unsure:

 

Well...... besides tessellation, which eats ram for dinner.......

 

 

Well, P3D2 will most certainly use more VRAM than FSX, by design.

 

System RAM on the other hand...ehhh...it's maybe a little better from what I've seen, but not much really can be done. 

 

I will laugh, when the day comes and we are on a 64bit platform, when the issue is no longer OOMs, and instead turns to disk paging when system RAM is saturated, and how slow it feels when P3Dv4 has to page to SSD with !developer !widget 8192 textures installed..

Any bit helps...   I also never use imagetool or DXTBmp unless for that rare bird that still uses extended BMP's...   There are a few I ran across but just end up converting the entire plane to DDS..  DTXBmp is awful. Having to export/import the alpha channel separately is one of the silliest things I've ever seen in an art app. 

I thought it might be prudent to add a bit more detail on this issue. DXTBMP.exe will generate good DXT1 or DXT5 textures provided one only loads an edited TARGA (.tga) file that's been saved by your favorite photo editing software.

 

Where it fails miserably is when you try to use the "Send to Editor" and "Refresh after Edit" functions. Whenever you do that you loose far too much detail and instead introduce visual artifacts into your image.

Ahhh see I never even bothered trying tgas with it, that's interesting Bill, and very helpful to me at least. 

 

 

Where it fails miserably is when you try to use the "Send to Editor" and "Refresh after Edit" functions. Whenever you do that you loose far too much detail and instead introduce visual artifacts into your image.

 

Ah, ok. Well, since I usually only use DTXBMP for removing window reflections this is fine with me: the purpose is to see nothing at all so visual artifacts aren't a problem then. ^_^ But whenever I will do some repainting, I will check out some other options!

Ahhh see I never even bothered trying tgas with it, that's interesting Bill, and very helpful to me at least. 

 

I use DXTBMP these days to load up 32bit .bmp files, then SaveAs TARGA (.tga).

 

I then load that targa file in Photoshop to do any editing, then Save as a layered PSD and Export as a .tga file if I need to resave from DXTBMP as a 32bit .BMP file.

 

If I am going to convert to DXT5 format however, I simply use the nVidia plugin directly from Photoshop...

Why not just run through and convert the entire plane to DDS.. DXTBmp is so much work just to manipulated those dreaded extended BMP's.. I'd rather just have  marathon session converting a fleet over to DDS entirely and rid of the extended BMP.. 

Why not just run through and convert the entire plane to DDS.. DXTBmp is so much work just to manipulated those dreaded extended BMP's.. I'd rather just have  marathon session converting a fleet over to DDS entirely and rid of the extended BMP.. 

Um, because FS9 doesn't support .dds files? Remember, as a developer I develop and provide support for three separate platforms... :lol:

Um, because FS9 doesn't support .dds files? Remember, as a developer I develop and provide support for three separate platforms... :lol:

 

Ahh yeah.. I'm thinking you're talking about your own personal fleet and not work related stuff.  :lol:  

Ahh yeah.. I'm thinking you're talking about your own personal fleet and not work related stuff.  :lol:  

Oddly enough, I have another "simulator" for relaxation (ETS2) and have occasional need for DXTBMP in that environment as well.

Oddly enough, I have another "simulator" for relaxation (ETS2) and have occasional need for DXTBMP in that environment as well.

 

I love ETS2.. for a game less than a GB in size it's amazingly deep, great mod support and a great time killer.

I love ETS2.. for a game less than a GB in size it's amazingly deep, great mod support and a great time killer.

I can only imagine what my shiny new GTX770 4GB Superclocked card will do for framerates in ETS2! I've been seeing ~80 with about 3/4ths of the options set.

I can only imagine what my shiny new GTX770 4GB Superclocked card will do for framerates in ETS2! I've been seeing ~80 with about 3/4ths of the options set.

 

(don't worry I won't stray too far with this convo as I know it's way off topic)

 

I run completely max w/ the NI SGSSAA settings without issue.  In case you weren't aware you can find them here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=122624230

It gives me road rage haha after which, the wife won't let me drive the car!

 

Sorry... Back to topic >>>

I appreciate this topic.  Decided to spend an hour or so today tweaking my graphics.  Looking to get a consistent 40-50 FPS.  I personally couldn't tell a difference in the higher texture sizes.  So I'm keeping it at 2048.