This message is for anyone who uses textures extensively in their J3D
application.  I've noticed that texture size has a severe impact on
performance in J3D.

In typical OGL / D3D applications I haven't noticed such a severe impact on
performance unless I push the application's texture memory over a hardware
texture memory limit or cause the overall system to start swapping.  In my
J3D application, I experience a 4x improvement in overall framerate when I
decrease my texture usage significantly and I am not:
        - swapping when using higher resolution textures
        - going over a hardware limit (this board doesn't support hardware texture
mapping)
The performance impact appears to be proportional to an increase in texture
resolution.

Given that the ultimate rendering of a textured polygon to the framebuffer
is just resulting in different  offsets through the textures depending on
the orientation of the polygon to the framebuffer, why is the performance
impact so great?

My only thoughts are:

1)  Smaller textures being operated on fit inside the processor cache and
thus the CPU can push the data to the framebuffer faster
2)  J3D or something below J3D is passing entire textures around on a
per-frame basis (why?)
3)  Mipmapping is having an effect somehow

I've run another application written on top of D3D and have experienced the
same performance degradation.  Specifically that application runs ~24-27
fps and to test performance differences I changed the texture to be all the
way from 1/8th the original texture amount all the way up to 2-4x the
original amount for about 200 textures without any change in performance.

My experiences are based on J3D D3D 1.2 (beta), Win2K, ATI Mobility-P chip,
192MB memory.

Any insights would be greatly appreciated.

--Mark

Mark Ferneau                    240-462-6262 (cell)
Director of Adv. Technology             801-437-4608 (efax)
Xtivia Technologies, Inc.               732-469-5954 x629 (NJ office)
[EMAIL PROTECTED]                      301-279-5703 (home office)
http://www.xtivia.com/          [EMAIL PROTECTED] (wireless email)

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