Originally posted by
feldon30:
...And memory is so cheap that there's no reason not to just go photograph something and stick it on there....
True enough, the latest crop of video cards carry a whopping 512 meg of dedicated VRAM but require PCI express slots. So that rules out a lot of users with older hardware. Plus once the texture buffers get full, the application has to do a lot of texture juggling, and that consumes backplane bandwidth, which in turn cases lag and slowed frame rates.
MA is so cool because it will run well at 1024x768xthousands of colors on an 8-meg VRAM system - my trusty and aged Pismo Powerbook. Its RAM cannot be upgraded or retrofitted to make room for textures.
But procedurally generated textures at that resolution might look nice and won't take up more VRAM.
I think. Here I'm not clear.