[Trivial Psychic]

TrashMan, as per your problem.  Is this a recent development, or have you always had these performance drops?

If it is recent, there is a slim chance that you might be experiencing a problem I had some time ago.  Early this year, I had my main WinME OS fail on me.  My girlfriend's brother repaired it for me and replaced my os with Win98SE.  After that, FSO performance seemed half of what it had been.  For months I played this cripled FSO until I discovered by accident that he never installed my VIA AGP drivers.  My GF2MX 32MB AGP card had been behaving like a PCI card all those months.  I installed the AGP drivers (but had to drop back from 4X to 1X to avoid some crashing and texture problems) and FSO hummed like a finely tuned engine... though I was running without shinemaps to save performance.  Now I run with an R9600XT and a beefed up system core, so I'm laughing... most of the time.

Later!

[Lightspeed]

Originally posted by Omniscaper
I am not attacking Lightspeed for using TGA's which I use myself. I was merely using his nebulas as an example of a heavy TGA use scenario. If I had a lousy rig, and FSO was unplayable because of his TGA usage, I would recommend people to use DDS so they can still see his hard work though in a lesser quality. The suggestion is not a personal attack on  Lightspeed. EVERYONE with dated hardware must sacrifice quality for performance. Its a balance issue that will always be there. I doubt Lightspeed would want people with low end rigs  to avoid his work altogether because their hardware can't handle it. I'm merely suggesting some form of compromise.

Am I biased for DDS, yes. Do I agree with Lightspeed's assesment of DDS failings, yes. DDS suck at subtle gradiations, and compression techniques, but they are excellent in improving performance, ESPECIALLY large textures ranging from 1024x1024 to 4096x4096.

8-bit PCX is better than DDS. However, if you use "-pcx32" it consumes the same amout as a TGA file. Another option is to use downscaled TGA versions. BOTH of those suggestions are substinentially better than DDS.

[Omniscaper]

To each his own.

[Kazan]

lightspeed is why FSO can eat up to 300megabytes

[Blitzerland]

Originally posted by Kazan
lightspeed is why FSO can eat up to 300megabytes

I tried enabling the "show-stats" or whatever flag, and it said I only had 144MB out of 516MB of RAM free. I have nothing whatsoever running in the background.

Is that FSO eating up nearly 400MB of RAM?! Yup. It sure is.

I have -JPGTGA and -GLOW and -SPEC.

Turn off -JPGTGA, and I only gain 3 MB of RAM. TGA files aren't that bad, and I don't see how I could live without Lightspeed's thruster glows.

[taylor]

Of course Lightspeed is also why it doesn't use well over 380Meg as it has done in the past even without the memory leaks.  Concsious beautification, that works for me.

Originally posted by Blitzerland
I tried enabling the "show-stats" or whatever flag, and it said I only had 144MB out of 516MB of RAM free. I have nothing whatsoever running in the background.

Nothing except Windows itself and a constantly resizing memory cache.  Before running the game open up task manager (assuming it's 2000 or XP) and look at the physical memory free.  While running the game subtract that previous number from what it lists as used and that would be a more accurate count.  It's still probably going to be in the 280-300 meg range though.