nVIDIA woes

Jason Freeman jason_freeman34 at hotmail.com
Tue Jun 20 01:06:32 CEST 2000

Thanks for the advice, Mark.

After quite a bit of tweaking, I've managed to get everything down to fairly 
minimal RAM and CPU usage. But there's a couple of lingering weirdnesses, 
which I'll describe below. Again, if you or anyone else has any advice, I'd 
really appreciate it:

1) My GEM patch runs in a loop of sorts, and I've noticed that beginning 
with the second iteration of the loop, XFree86 takes about a 15-20 MB larger 
RAM partition than it did at the same point during the first iteration.

I assume that it's caching/buffering some things automatically? I've already 
done my best to try to purge images loaded with the "pix_image" object when 
they're not needed (it seems that sending a bogus "open" message to 
pix_image makes it clear out its current image). Is there some way to limit 
the amount/size of caching that's being done, or to reset/free this extra 
RAM? Or is there something else that could be causing this? (I don't think 
it's a memory leak, because it doesn't continue increasing in subsequent 

2) About 1 in 10 times, when I texture map an image to a square and display 
it on the screen, a "ghost" of the top of the image appears at the bottom of 
the image as well. If I turn off rendering and then turn it back on again, 
the ghost usually disappears. I've noticed that this only happens when my 
original image is 256x256 pixels or larger, but it happens with both TIFF 
and JPEG formats. The only other items in these Gemlists are simple color 
changes, alpha objects, and translate objects. The size of the object I'm 
texture mapping onto doesn't seem to matter.

Again, thanks for any help!

Mark Danks wrote:
>   I have posted it a few times, and finally updated the documentation, but
>DO NOT USE PIX_DRAW!!!  There are no graphics cards (except some SGI ones)
>which have hardware acceleration for the OpenGL commands behind pix_draw.
>ALWAYS use pix_texture.  You should not be wasting any more main memory,
>although the texture will be resident on the graphics card.  If you are
>trying to push gigabytes of textures in a piece, let me know...people have
>done this before and it is possible to do.


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