OpenGL and D3d textures...?

[FlyingHamster]

I was wondering how many megs u guys use up for textures in PCI mode. Its in the card's additional properties. How many do you use in OpenGL AND in D3d...?

What does this do, and is it really important? thnx...

[muno]

I use the default values, umm.. was it 15mb in d3d and 31mb in opengl.

When I had my asus tnt3400, always when installing drivers it asked what mode I wanted them. There was some compatibility mode (I had to use it) and there was strict agp mode.
I think the compatibility mode used pci sometimes.
This is all just 'think', I know nothing about that pci mode really
-M

Well, it all depends on the card. If it is an AGP card, you can set this value to zero in D3D, but with nVidia, 2 meg is the minimum for OpenGL. AGP cards use sidebanding (albeit seldomly) which is a feature of the AGP slot. This puts it directly on it's own communication path with your system's RAM. This is seldomly used because most AGP video cards have enough ram on their board to not need the system's RAM. When it starts using the system RAM, things get slow.

If you have a PCI card, you will usually need to allocate some system memory for it to use, as most PCI cards don't have the copious amounts of RAM that AGP cards tend to come to. 32 meg used to be enough memory for a card to stay out of system resources, but with newer games, this number can increase. Soooo, it really depends on how much RAM is on your card. If it's a 16 meg PCI card, you might want to allocate 16 megs or so of system memory for it's use to store textures.

Again, remember that you don't need to allocate any for an AGP slot. AGP texturing is done on it's own.

I would recommend getting an AGP card, since the PCI bus puts your video card in a position where it has to share with everything else you've got installed, like soundcards, modems, etc...

Unless you got a nice PCI card like a Voodoo 5 5500...