How do I stop texture thrashing?

[Pamela Galli]

Started all of a sudden on several textures.I am using Singularity on an iMac. 

[Nalates Urriah]

Ask in the Singularity Support group in-world.

If the thrashing starts as soon as you login, check your HUD's. There are HUD's made using a load of large textures. This consumes video ram and leads to thrashing.

If thrashing doesn't start until you have been logged in for a time, consider closing groups as quickly as they open. The tiny thumbnails used in chat are made from large profile images. Unfortunately a peculiarity of viewer design is that video memory used by the large image is never released. Developers are working on the problem. For now, it takes a relog to free the memory.

If your video card has less than 500mb of video ram, you can turn on texture compression. I'm not sure whether thrashing or the low rez textures from compression is worse.

If your computer is using HD Graphics, you should be able to assign more RAM to video use, which should decrease thrashing, but if you have little RAm will cause a prformance hit. But, you may be able to add RAM and reduce the problem for HD graphics systems. You can find cheap memory on eBay.

Or you might get a video card with more memory from eBay. This usually isn't an option for laptops.

On a laptop make sure you are using your high-quality settings, not the power savings settings. Some laptops have a video chip but refuse to use it with SL unless explicitly told to do so. The setting will be in the video card setup/controls.

[Pamela Galli]

Thank you Natales -- before posting here I had read your blog article on this :-) It does not start on login, but after a little while. But I did not know what you meant about group chat icons -- I dont think Sing has those -- and in any case I keep group chats closed. I have no HUDs. I have 4096 MB video ram, but it was only set to 400, so I raised it to 512, will let you know if that fixes it.  I do need to keep textures uncompressed as I spend most of my time inworld trying out the textures I make (I keep them as small as I can but I am making a house now and have to use some large ones).  

 

 

[Pamela Galli]

I logged in for a little while, did not notice the thrasing after raising the video memory limit :-)

[irihapeti]

it can also help by changing the debug setting: TextureLoadFullRes = TRUE

basically when TRUE then textures only display full rez or they dont display at all. They dont rez lossy (fuzzy)

 

[Pamela Galli]

Thanks, will try that -- raising the memory allotment seems to have helped some , but it is still thrashing.