NiranV Dean

Your ATI is definetly not lower class , but might not yet be set in the GPU table in this case SL will automatically set it to a level 0 card

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Lil Hapmouche

Like Niran said, the AMD 6970 (ATI was bought out like 2 years ago) is actually on the same level as the GTX570. Except for the 2GB bonus which should in theory be highly beneficial for such a texture intense environment such as SL, so it should actually be superior.

If you don't get the same performance, though, I strongly suggest playing with your settings, both in the viewer and in the driver control panel. Especially toying with the anti aliasing settings will lead to differences.

NiranV Dean

SL is hardcapīd at 512 and even those it doesnt use fully nor right , so everything higher than 7xx mb (512 or SL and 2xx for everything else) is way more than enough

Lil Hapmouche

Since the expert is in, it's a perfect chance to abuse this opportunity

What about running multiple viewers at once, say 3 instances for example?
Would they share the 512 limit, so each one would have some odd 170 MB, or would you face 3 x 512 MB?

Dolly

I have an nvidia card with 1GB...which usually fills up to the brim after a while of running either Cool VL viewer or Firestorm on my computer. If only 512MB of all that data is textures, then what else is using the remaining 512MB? When I am on the Windows desktop, only about 60MB is in use on the graphics card.

I also seem to recall, (though I might be mistaken) that the texture memory slider in SL is not indicative of the actual memory used, but that the amount is multiplied by a certain factor according to LL. I do not recall by how much, though:/

NiranV Dean

the multiplier is set to 1 and doesnt work as far as iīve tested it , SLīs Video Memory is simply hardcapīd at 512 because it were allowed to be set higher long ago which caused LOOOOTS of problems , instability and crashes/freezes, what else is using your Video memory? idk , but i dont think SL is doing that otherwise SL would be ignoring your settings AND SLīs internal max but i might have an idea what it could be , remember the Private Memory Pool? that might fill additional Video Memory and cache the rest into RAM (probably) im not sure about this Private Memory Project...its just enabled for me , set to 4GB and Failure Prevention is off to prevent it screwing my Second Life by telling me it will shutdown in 30 seconds to "prevent" a crash.... for me thats nearly the same as a timed crash

ShrugDangle

Since it's relatively slow as hell to copy stuff across the PCIe bus, that extra memory is being used by shader programs, deferred frames, pre-rendered frames for certain kinds of antialiasing, triple-buffering, frame buffer, etc. Like you noticed, textures are just a small portion of it.