Yep.. you guys are right!
After your posts, I did a bit of research and found that there are two blitz commands I'd missed... TotalVidMem and AvailVidMem.
So, armed with these, I did a couple of quick tests (I tried the textures saved in 8,16,24 and 32 bit formats...) and yes, I can indeed verify that textures are stored in the screen bitdepth.
Seems like a huge waste of video memory to me! (But, I don't fully understand all the issues, obviously...)
Unfortunately, I get very wierd artifacting with a 16-bit bitdepth (ever since I went to a Geforce4) :(
So, I am stuck with 32 bits... which means the amount of textures I can cram in is very limited (I hate using small textures on big models... the blurriness looks foul!).
Do you guys have any idea what sort of performance penalty you pay if you exceed the available video memory... I assume textures have to be copied across from sytems memory across the AGP bus? And that would be bad?
Thanks for your help!
After your posts, I did a bit of research and found that there are two blitz commands I'd missed... TotalVidMem and AvailVidMem.
So, armed with these, I did a couple of quick tests (I tried the textures saved in 8,16,24 and 32 bit formats...) and yes, I can indeed verify that textures are stored in the screen bitdepth.
Seems like a huge waste of video memory to me! (But, I don't fully understand all the issues, obviously...)
Unfortunately, I get very wierd artifacting with a 16-bit bitdepth (ever since I went to a Geforce4) :(
So, I am stuck with 32 bits... which means the amount of textures I can cram in is very limited (I hate using small textures on big models... the blurriness looks foul!).
Do you guys have any idea what sort of performance penalty you pay if you exceed the available video memory... I assume textures have to be copied across from sytems memory across the AGP bus? And that would be bad?
Thanks for your help!