Oolite Bulletins

Well, I've installed some OXPs (for example FP, PAGroove's stations and other graphical expansions and I have often CTD... this is caused by insufficient graphics memory, because in log I see a message "cannot allocate 16 MB memory for textures". I have 2 GB RAM and Radeon X1550. I thought it will be sufficient, but I was wrong...but is any possibility to optimize these OXps for consuming less memory? I won't turn off shaders...is my GFX-Card really so weak?

OSH wrote:

Well, I've installed some OXPs (for example FP, PAGroove's stations and other graphical expansions and I have often CTD... this is caused by insufficient graphics memory, because in log I see a message "cannot allocate 16 MB memory for textures". I have 2 GB RAM and Radeon X1550. I thought it will be sufficient, but I was wrong...but is any possibility to optimize these OXps for consuming less memory? I won't turn off shaders...is my GFX-Card really so weak?

Graphics can become big fast. When you press shift-F, and look at the second line you see after the number of entities, between brackets:
the number of textures used by those entities, the total amount of memory they use and the memory per texture.
A lot of textures are identical (e.g. 5 identical pods drifting nearby). For those memory is shared. But the more ships you install the more likely it becomes that every ship uses unique texture. Not all of those textures is present in memory, only then the ship comes in drawing distance.

FP has got some huge planet textures IIRC. One thing you can do is look for all the .png files inside AddOns, and if you see something big (more than 1024 * 512, I'd say) you can always rename the original and use a reduced copy with the original name.

You will lose some of the graphic detail, but that should remove those 16 mb problems - that's normally caused by the expanded pictures taking a lot more space in video memory than they do on disk.

I almost forgot: Oolite always resizes pictures intenally to the nearest 256 pixels. And, if you get a 4096*2048 picture resize it first to 2048*1024, it might well be enough to remove the problem!

Hope this helps!

Most of the specs I see for that card list it with either 256 or 512MB VRAM ... So, yes, you're going to have some memory issues if those specs match your card ...

I seriously doubt that it will help you at all, but just on the off chance: This thread has a brief discussion of the 3GB switch, and the OP has a link to a tutorial on how to activate it.

SiriusCG wrote:

Most of the specs I see for that card list it with either 256 or 512MB VRAM ... So, yes, you're going to have some memory issues if those specs match your card ...

Seriously? Assassin's Creed 2 recommends only a 512MB graphics card and will allegedly run on a 256MB card.

Sounds like the textures need optimizing as Kaks already stated. The fact that it sounds like the card is having a problem allocating 16MB chunks would suggest to me that the problem isn't the total memory of the card, but I'm not expert.

As always, to the OP you should make sure you're running the most up-to-date drivers for your graphics card.

It's also possible that you're just trying to run too much stuff. In which case SiriusCG is right, you'd better by a 2GB graphics card.

Well, I plan buy Geforce 9500 GT with 1 GB RAM. Will be this sufficient?

My Desktop PC (Athlon 2800+ 128MB GF6600GT, 2.5GB RAM) can just about run Oolite nowadays - it runs the core game and most OXPs really well actually - but does struggle when there's lots of stuff on the screen or Famous Planets is in my AddOns folder.

My work laptop is an XPS 1730 (2x 512MB 9500M GTs) and it runs Oolite just fine.

My cheapo 256mb zotac card runs Oolite nicely also...

I'm running Oolite on a 2GHz Core Duo iMac with 4GB of RAM and an ATi RadeonX1600 (128MB) graphics chip. The only complaint I have is with those big shipyards with the rotating rings and spinning ships outside them. Slows my game right down. Any chance of a redesign of those things?!?

My system isn't top of the range but then i also don't have trouble running anything either. Intel core 2 duo E8500 3.16Ghz, 4gb ram, nvidia geforce GT 240 1Gb ram. Using Win XP 32 bit. Those being the important bits.

It turns out i'm running 64 oxp's lol, didn't think i had that many until i just counted them up, explains the variety in my copy of Oolite, but the new gfx card does help. And it all runs in 1680 x 1050 resolution very sweetly indeed.

In answer to ther above though, 128mb ram will cause slowdown, the PNG format used for the textures are a resource hog, no doubts there. Having just converted some of Griff's ships to run in another game, and converting the textures to DDS format, i've dramatically reduced texture file sizes, but i'm almost sure that Oolite can't do that. Don't know what other option there is apart from getting some more video ram really.

Gibbon wrote:

My system isn't top of the range but then i also don't have trouble running anything either. Intel core 2 duo E8500 3.16Ghz, 4gb ram, nvidia geforce GT 240 1Gb ram. Using Win XP 32 bit. Those being the important bits.

It turns out i'm running 64 oxp's lol, didn't think i had that many until i just counted them up, explains the variety in my copy of Oolite, but the new gfx card does help. And it all runs in 1680 x 1050 resolution very sweetly indeed.

In answer to ther above though, 128mb ram will cause slowdown, the PNG format used for the textures are a resource hog, no doubts there. Having just converted some of Griff's ships to run in another game, and converting the textures to DDS format, i've dramatically reduced texture file sizes, but i'm almost sure that Oolite can't do that. Don't know what other option there is apart from getting some more video ram really.

But the PNG format is irrelevant - as this isn't the format used by the graphics card when its actually inside the game - there's an excellent explanation by Ahruman somewhere, but I can't find it at the moment!

DaddyHoggy wrote:

But the PNG format is irrelevant - as this isn't the format used by the graphics card when its actually inside the game - there's an excellent explanation by Ahruman somewhere, but I can't find it at the moment!

I expect Gibbon is using S3TC compression (aka DXT), which is a fixed-ratio (1:4) lossy compression format that most graphics cards can decode on the fly.

@ Ahruman

That's 100% correct. The other game i write mods for is Freelancer and that can't use PNG format. It only understands TGA which is ok but gives massive file sizes or DDS, which as long as you keep them square, work great and hugely reduce file size.

OSH wrote:

I have 2 GB RAM and Radeon X1550

Maybe I should have been back earlier. However, if this problem is still present or other people have the same problem, here's the "why" this is a problem:

I've got a X1550 myself and it's sorted out, only in use as backup card when one of my good ones break. The card was advertised as having 1GiB RAM, but it has only 512MiB RAM. Still, that's more than the 256MiB card in my other computer - but the card is nasty: It allocates RAM from the computer itself and does use it as graphics RAM. That's why the X1550 is performing much worse than the few years older 256MiB card in my other computer.

That approach is very bad, as it is not only very slow, but also does eat up a lot of RAM from the computer itself. With only 2GiB RAM for the computer, the card will massively reduce that amount, so the computer can only use far less than those 2GiB, most probably somewhere slightly below 1GiB of RAM will be left for the computer (unless the amount taken by the card does vary more than I've seen with my computers who have more RAM - there it easily did eat up 1.5GiB of RAM).

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