On Tue, 21 Jan 2003, Jos Hulzink wrote: > On Mon, 20 Jan 2003, Fabio Alemagna wrote: > > > On Mon, 20 Jan 2003, Jos Hulzink wrote: > > > > Why should you backup the whole gfx board's memory? Isn't there any way to > > back up only the area actually used by the application? > > > > You know, Amigas deal with full screen graphics and swappable screens > > perfectly since they're born, even with gfx cards. > > Good old Amiga... yes you can, but as you see memory is really growing too > fast. Say I run Unreal Tournament 2003 on both console 1 and 2. I run > 1280x1024 true colour with 32 bit Z buffer, the rest of the memory is > filled with textures, and if I had 64 MB instead of 32, it would have > filled those too. UT 2003 isn't that small itself, so it takes 64 MB of > main memory already. What should I do when I switch console ? Out of > memory error: you are not allowed to swich console untill you quit this > program ? Swap Unreal to disk ?
If there's no memory left THEN stop the program. Apart from the fact that running two instances of unreal is really a silly example... who'd want to do that? > I wanna bet Amigas didn't save the framebuffer unless the amount of memory > needed was much smaller than the amount of memory available. Amigas deal (present tense) with the issue by allocating one offscreen buffer per "screen" (the ggi's visual counterpart). > Besides, the software mapped to the background will still consume cpu > power needed for the foreground task, and it only helps applications that > use unaccellerated framebuffer access. Other apps will be blocked > immediately by the accellerator. Think about the amount of software that > will be. Of course acceleration doesn't work on offscreen buffers (unless those buffers are in gfx memory): in that case just disable it, what's the problem? As for the cpu time consumed: well, so what? If the program needs to consume cpu so be it, who said that just because I put it offscreen it doesn't need to do what I wanted it to? Don't forget that not only games could run on kgi. Fabio Alemagna
