Upper limit to planetary textures?

Lestradae · Post by **Lestradae** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 4:02 pm

Was experimenting with the super-HD planetary textures thrown around in the Famous Planets a bit and tried out using them for System Redux.

Now I have noticed that the biggest one, a 32 MB texture with ca. 8000*4000 pixels, either fails to show up or even crashes Oolite.

Please note that this can't be a memory problem, as the 16 MB textures work flawlessly and without any drop in the FPS!

Is there an upper limit from which on Oolite's graphics engine gives out, or what kind of issue could cause that problem?

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 4:59 pm

Lestradae wrote:
Now I have noticed that the biggest one, a 32 MB texture with ca. 8000*4000 pixels, either fails to show up or even crashes Oolite.

Try running OpenGL Extensions Viewer!

For my 4870x2 with 2GiB I get this:
Max texture size: 8192 x 8192

For my X800XTPE with 256MiB I get this:
Max texture size: 2048 x 2048

Screet

Cmd. Cheyd · Post by **Cmd. Cheyd** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 5:15 pm

Nvidia Quatro NVS 140M
256Mb

Max Texture- 8192x8192...
I'll have to run this on my home box, see how it fairs...

@Lestradae - If you'd like me to upload a 4k x 2k version, I'll happily do so... Or any other size someone would like.

Lestradae · Post by **Lestradae** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 5:21 pm

Screet wrote:
Try running OpenGL Extensions Viewer!

Wait - is this some graphics cards conundrum again?

Grrr ... my card has additional 780 or so MBs of graphic capability, and then they restrict it below 32 MBs?

That would be exceptionally stupid.

Where/how do I get a OpenGL Extensions Viewer?

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 5:27 pm

Lestradae wrote:
Screet wrote:
Try running OpenGL Extensions Viewer!
Wait - is this some graphics cards conundrum again?

Grrr ... my card has additional 780 or so MBs of graphic capability, and then they restrict it below 32 MBs?

That would be exceptionally stupid.

Where/how do I get a OpenGL Extensions Viewer?

Never underestimate the potential for stupidity in mankind! It may be something else...but I instantly recalled that there were some restrictions listed in that thing. You can get it there:
http://www.realtech-vr.com/glview/

Screet
P.S.: They apparantly like to limit it to viewport (no bigger textures than fullscreen or such - but I guess you want a big texture in order to allow high detailed planet while flying close to it, when you can only see a little fraction of it)

Lestradae · Post by **Lestradae** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 6:00 pm

Screet wrote:
Never underestimate the potential for stupidity in mankind! It may be something else...but I instantly recalled that there were some restrictions listed in that thing. You can get it there:
http://www.realtech-vr.com/glview/

You're absolutely correct about the stupidity.

I downloaded it, started it, and you know what:

&%/& Vista says: "System.AccessViolationException ... openglex.blablablabla ..."

They really can't get anything right. It doesn't work.

Screet wrote:
P.S.: They apparantly like to limit it to viewport (no bigger textures than fullscreen or such - but I guess you want a big texture in order to allow high detailed planet while flying close to it, when you can only see a little fraction of it)

Exactly, that's what I want the texture for.

"no bigger textures than fullscreen" - what a stupid idea.

Any idea how I can get OpenGLExtensions to work besides just throwing Vista out at last?

Grrreetings

L

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 6:13 pm

Lestradae wrote:
&%/& Vista says: "System.AccessViolationException ... openglex.blablablabla ..."

Strange! I'm running Vista and did get it to run. However, one of the OpenGL test apps instantly crashes once I try to run the "stability test" on my Vista machine. M$ apparantly knows about the problem, but it looks like ATIs DLL to be the cause.

Anyway...I've just packaged three free OpenGL test apps I've been toying with in the past days, all running under Vista on my machine, and sent it via email to you. Maybe I got a different version or such? Let's hope they do the job!

About the texture: I'm not sure if there is any good way to change a planet into something with multiple textures....but apparantly that is the way those OpenGL designers intend it to be. I don't get it...a large texture may be annoying to load once, but if it can stay in RAM, there shouldn't be much problems, the drivers should even be able to determine which parts of the large texture can be seen and thus only use those for further calculations. Maybe one of Oolites OpenGL gurus can help you better than I can with this one.

Screet

Lestradae · Post by **Lestradae** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 6:19 pm

Screet wrote:
Anyway...I've just packaged three free OpenGL test apps I've been toying with in the past days, all running under Vista on my machine, and sent it via email to you. Maybe I got a different version or such? Let's hope they do the job!

Thanks, will test them right away

The problem really is the bigger texture. I just downsized the texture to a 4k*2k pixel one, and now the planet shows. Weird. With 1GB of RAM my Oolite version uses one should assume that 16MBs more or less are pretty much irrelevant ...

How do those M$ people think? I don't get my head around it. Perhaps better that way.

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 6:29 pm

Lestradae wrote:
How do those M$ people think? I don't get my head around it. Perhaps better that way.

Once they thought 640K would be enough for everyone.

Before burnout, I've also had to fix some problems with a GIS our company is selling. You know what? Newer Windows versions don't have a problem with bitmaps of some size, but the older Windows versions have been EXTREMELY restricted on that part. We had to use an immensely high amount of small tiles. Funny thing: That also resulted in false-alarms of some virus scanners, as such tiles could by chance have the same bit pattern as some virus! Argh...and then M$ becomes extremely slow using many small files. For other applications, we then had to write our own system to store many files in one and access them in there in order to circumvent the problems imposed by M$ when using many small files.

If the developers of games would use that technique, installing, disc usage and load times would be much better. Especially with stuff like M$ FlightSim...but those people just don't do it, wasting so much time and space with their approach.

Screet

Lestradae · Post by **Lestradae** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 6:34 pm

OK, got three files. Only one of those I had before. glview311.exe doesn't work the same as the one I downloaded.

TechPowerUp tells me I have a NVidia GForce 8600M GT. Knew that one before. Then there is a lot of data. Didn't know that before, but not a lot of ideas what it means. Should I look for something specific?

My GPU temperature is about 64°C. Does sound pretty high to me. Is this normal or should I get worried? There are three red lines advancing. My GPU Core & Memory Clock obviously have 275 and 200 MBs respectively. Good or bad?

Oh yeah:

Max texture size: 8192
Max uniforms: 4096*2048

How can I change this?

Cmd. Cheyd · Post by **Cmd. Cheyd** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 6:34 pm

I just installed and ran it on 4 Vista systems - all x86. You're not using x64 by chance? I can test that one tonight...

Anyways, all 4 successfully ran the OpenGL Extensions Viewer. I'm using a mix of ATI and Nvidia cards. And I'm not limited to viewport-sized textures. I'm running with the 32MB texture and it displays properly on all 4. Hell, the primary machine I built and "tested" the texture with was my laptop...

If it was a Vista thing, it'd be consistent behavior. This obviously is NOT consistent.

Cmd. Cheyd · Post by **Cmd. Cheyd** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 6:36 pm

Likely can't change it... It would be a limitation of either the driver itself, or possibly the hardware. Changing it would mean driver changes, or hardware upgrades.

Lestradae · Post by **Lestradae** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 6:37 pm

Cmd. Cheyd wrote:
You're not using x64 by chance?

Not that I know of ... how do I find that out?

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 6:48 pm

Cmd. Cheyd wrote:
I just installed and ran it on 4 Vista systems - all x86. You're not using x64 by chance? I can test that one tonight...

If it was a Vista thing, it'd be consistent behavior. This obviously is NOT consistent.

Maybe the info I provided was not enough

Vista 32 - 4870x2 2GiB: 8192x8192

XP X64 - X800XTPE 256MiB: 2048x2048
(and same with XP 32bit)

If it's not XP restricting the driver to a smaller viewport and texture size, then either the chipset of the graphics card does it or the driver uses different sizes according to the chipset detected. I cannot switch the graphics cards between those two machines (AGP vs. PCI-E) to report if that makes any difference. Guess we would have to wait for more reports or someone to provide a definite answer to this question.

Anyway...the annoying part is that this is really not consistent. What works on one machine won't work on the other...therefore we need to find a good lower limit that allows to run this on many systems without losing too much detail.

Screet

Screet · Post by **Screet** » Thu Feb 19, 2009 6:50 pm

Lestradae wrote:
Cmd. Cheyd wrote:
You're not using x64 by chance?
Not that I know of ... how do I find that out?

right click on computer, read properties, then have a look for system type.

If you can use more than 3GiB RAM, you must have Vista 64.

Screet

Oolite Bulletins

Upper limit to planetary textures?

Upper limit to planetary textures?

Re: Upper limit to planetary textures?

Re: Upper limit to planetary textures?

Re: Upper limit to planetary textures?

Re: Upper limit to planetary textures?

Re: Upper limit to planetary textures?

Re: Upper limit to planetary textures?

Re: Upper limit to planetary textures?

Results

*

Re: *