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Forum » SpaceEngine » Troubleshooting and Solutions » Using LOD 1 & 2 on PCs with small VRAM (for NVidia Cards)
Using LOD 1 & 2 on PCs with small VRAM
midtskogenDate: Sunday, 03.03.2013, 07:33 | Message # 76
Star Engineer
Group: Users
Norway
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Quote (HarbingerDawn)
Even a weak GPU is still much more powerful than the strongest CPU.

Quote (Tallest_Skil)
Ah, I challenge that. Terragen runs off of CPU rendering, for example. Great improvements there come from a more powerful processor.

These are pointless comparisons, unless you specify exactly what task you're going to use the CPU/GPU for. They're good a different things, and you get the best of two worlds if your program make good use of both. SE can benefit from both, and has a lot of spare processing power to tap from in the CPU.

Anything that can be solved using the vectorised media instructions (usually 128 bit wide) can give an impressive number of operations per cycle on a modern CPU. It doesn't fit every task, but I would think texture and bumpmap generation would be good candidates. CPU's get an increasing number of cores these days. Single core performance is flatting out, so more cores is what will keep Moore's law true until the next barrier. I've become somewhat a fan of the Tilera chips and I hope Intel soon will keep up (a 64 or 100 core x86 would be a great toy). It's the logical thing to do next for general purpose CPU's. But to make full use of that parallelism you need a slightly different programming approach and design from the start. Adding multithreading as an afterthought helps, but may not give very good load balancing if not done properly. So that's a challenge to all existing applications that was written single threaded. Multithreading gives you a lot of power, but it's not free unless you designed your program to do stuff asynchronously.



NIL DIFFICILE VOLENTI
 
Tallest_SkilDate: Wednesday, 20.03.2013, 22:50 | Message # 77
Observer
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United States
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Quote (HarbingerDawn)
Looking at my task manager I can see that about half of the processes running on my PC are 32-bit


I generally live in a different world, then. None of mine are! OS X is good about getting everything updated at once.

And you're right about Terragen; I hadn't taken into account the difference between the types of rendering. Industrial dump truck vs. sport car for the CPU and GPU, eh?

Added (21.03.2013, 01:50)
---------------------------------------------
Bah. I had great performance with changing these settings before my recent Space Engine reinstall. Now, nothing. In fact, it won't even load the planetarium; it just sits loading meshes for all eternity as my GPU's fan switches between 1 and 2k RPM a second at a time.

I may as well just give up until an 8000 series card works with my system and I can justify a new GPU purchase.

EDIT: Oh that is flipping awesome. Forum software that automatically combines double posts? Yes, please. Why don't the big name softwares do that?





Edited by Tallest_Skil - Wednesday, 20.03.2013, 22:51
 
DarkcloakDate: Friday, 03.05.2013, 23:54 | Message # 78
Astronaut
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United States
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Since I'm working in 0.97, now, the main.cfg file already has the settings at max (VideoMemorySize 2048, etc). The tg_terra_height.glsl is also different. Is there a way to tweak this stuff differently in the new release?
 
SyphusDate: Monday, 06.01.2014, 08:11 | Message # 79
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Since this was for an earlier version, is this still valid information?
 
HarbingerDawnDate: Monday, 06.01.2014, 09:29 | Message # 80
Cosmic Curator
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United States
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Quote Syphus ()
Since this was for an earlier version, is this still valid information?

Some of it. I personally use the following:

Code
VideoMemoryDynamicDetect    false    // use auto detection of available amount of video memory (VRAM) in runtime
VideoMemorySize             4095    // video memory size to use if VideoMemoryDynamicDetect = false
VideoMemoryMaxPercent       95  // max video memory consumption (percents)

But what works best for you will depend on your own experiences and system specs. Also, it's not as useful as it was before, since SE is better with memory detection and management than it used to be.



All forum users, please read this!
My SE mods and addons
Phenom II X6 1090T 3.2 GHz, 16 GB DDR3 RAM, GTX 970 3584 MB VRAM
 
SyphusDate: Monday, 06.01.2014, 22:48 | Message # 81
Observer
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I'll give it a try then, those look like good enough numbers to start with.
 
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