Graphic performance tradeoffs

[phoenix]

There is another significant disadvantage for MONSTER sets: DXT5nm uses more than a factor of 2 more space on the harddisk and for dowloading! That difference can easily come up to > 1 GB. PNG's compress 9:1 while DXT5 does only 4:1.

On the level of 1k /tiles/ and 256MB cards, the DXT5 memory advantages seem less convincing. By playing with the new packed tileset, I got the feeling, however, that the texture loading is faster/smoother than in case of PNG tiles. I will look into that aspect quantitatively soon.

Bye Fridger

compared to the rate disk-space and broadband is developing, graphics-card memory increases really slow.
i've bought my 128 MB GF5900 over 2 years ago and the best they can offer now is 256MB whereas i have a 6 MBit connection and about 0.8 TB disk-space available.

so in my opinion faster loading and less memory-usage > large packages to download

[selden]

Phoenix,

512MB PCI-e Nvidia and ATI consumer graphics cards have been available for a while now, and professional graphics cards are available that support 1GB. For a lot of money.

You're right about the relatively slow rate of improvement, though. Part of the problem is the fixed amount of graphics card real-estate that's available and the relatively slow improvement in the density of high performance memory chips. My understanding is that some graphics drivers implement swapping between graphics and main memory, but that's quite slow, of course.

[t00fri]

There is another significant disadvantage for MONSTER sets: DXT5nm uses more than a factor of 2 more space on the harddisk and for dowloading! That difference can easily come up to > 1 GB. PNG's compress 9:1 while DXT5 does only 4:1.

On the level of 1k /tiles/ and 256MB cards, the DXT5 memory advantages seem less convincing. By playing with the new packed tileset, I got the feeling, however, that the texture loading is faster/smoother than in case of PNG tiles. I will look into that aspect quantitatively soon.

Bye Fridger

compared to the rate disk-space and broadband is developing, graphics-card memory increases really slow.
i've bought my 128 MB GF5900 over 2 years ago and the best they can offer now is 256MB whereas i have a 6 MBit connection and about 0.8 TB disk-space available.

so in my opinion faster loading and less memory-usage > large packages to download

++++++++++++++++++
There are not too expensive NV cards with 512 MB, giving a factor of 4 in 2 years. 2 years ago 1000-2000 kbit/sec lines were average. That's a factor of 4 relative to what we have now (6000 kbit/sec). 2 years ago, 100 GB of hd space was conisdered "respectable", while nowadays 400 GB is what people use...
++++++++++++++++++

I was saying that in case of TILES the card memory aspect is less imposing, since we only load a few 1k x 1k tiles at a time. Moreover, my tiles are pole optimized in resolution, meaning that the simultaneous loading of MANY overlapping tiles in polar regions is avoided without loss of quality. Hence by this measure the request for card memory is substantially LOWERED.

Agreed?

Bye Fridger

[phoenix]

Phoenix,

512MB PCI-e Nvidia and ATI consumer graphics cards have been available for a while now, and professional graphics cards are available that support 1GB. For a lot of money.

yes i know but i've read some tests about all those 512MB-monsters which where a lot slower than any other 256MB-card due to slower ram and other limitations.

You're right about the relatively slow rate of improvement, though. Part of the problem is the fixed amount of graphics card real-estate that's available and the relatively slow improvement in the density of high performance memory chips. My understanding is that some graphics drivers implement swapping between graphics and main memory, but that's quite slow, of course.

right, thats what all on-board-cards are doing and thats what AGP was designed for.
with PCIe "hopefully" that trend is now over.

phoenix wrote:

i have a 6 MBit connection

This is rather slow compared to the capabilities of a networkcard which is supposed to have 100 mbs. Some of the equipment I used to deal with for the phone companies were reaching transport speeds of 400 gbs over fiber 6 years ago and still in use today although I believe the speeds are in the tbs range now.

well my server got 100 MBit and i could upgrade my home-connection to 16 Mbit ADSL2 for free but there are so few servers out there who support such hich uploads that 6 Mbit is really enough for now.
with full 6 Mbit i could download a 1 GB texture-pack in 30 min, i doesn't need to get much faster for me.

but lets not make this a graphics & network-discussion
celestia will always support both PNG and DXT-Compression so one may choose whatever he likes more.

[selden]

I'm not sure what you mean by "now over". It's a cost/performance tradeoff. Swapping to a slower memory medium is a way to provide access to much more storage than could otherwise be afforded.

Nvidia's 7300 series (which are PCI-e cards) and many low cost laptop graphics chipsets are designed to use the computer's main memory as their graphics memory, with a varying amount of caching local to the graphics chips. Of course, they often use a direct memory channel, but whether the secondary memory is accessed by way of the PCI-e bus or a direct memory channel is up to the system designer.

p.s.
I think awareness of these tradeoffs in hardware and texture formats needs to be a consideration for Addon designers: hires vs medres vs lores. Do you provide all of them or do you concentrate your efforts on one of them?

[phoenix]

I'm not sure what you mean by "now over". It's a cost/performance tradeoff. Swapping to a slower memory medium is a way to provide access to much more storage than could otherwise be afforded.

i was talking about high-end graphics cards where this tradeoff is not an option, its just way too slow.

[t00fri]

Phoenix, Selden at al.,

please note this is NOT a general thread about graphics cards and network connections etc!

It is quite essential to retain a certain amount of transparency in these various threads about developer issues. If this doesn't work, we may preferrably retreat again to the developer list.

Bye Fridger

[selden]

agreed.

I'll try to split them into a separate thread in the Users forum.

[selden]

Grrr.
phpbb v2 doesn't have a "merge topic" function yet.

Sorry: this is out of order and attributed to me. It was originally posted by Cartrite.

Posted: Sun Sep 03, 2006 6:35 am

Selden wrote:

You're right about the relatively slow rate of improvement, though. Part of the problem is the fixed amount of graphics card real-estate that's available and the relatively slow improvement in the density of high performance memory chips. My understanding is that some graphics drivers implement swapping between graphics and main memory, but that's quite slow, of course.

Mabey the reason things are progressing so slowly is that companies that used to make such chips just about went out of business. A child company (spinoff, remember the transistor) from my old employer used to make such chips and they laid off just about all thier employees and closed about all thier manufactoring plants, 4 in my area alone, and sold all thier assets.I think mabey the companies left may fear investing too much in developing such chips in such a volatile environment. I don't see the company mentioned above recovering anytime soon. I guess it takes time for wounds to heal and some other company to get large enough to fill the void.

phoenix wrote:

i have a 6 MBit connection

This is rather slow compared to the capabilities of a networkcard which is supposed to have 100 mbs. Some of the equipment I used to deal with for the phone companies were reaching transport speeds of 400 gbs over fiber 6 years ago and still in use today although I believe the speeds are in the tbs range now.

Someday. but not today, I think we all will be in for a shock. Kind of like the Wright brothers would be if they were around today. Things always have been up or down. At the moment, I think down.

cartrite
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