Sorry about that -- I somehow hit something
and the news reader posted the message in
the middle of composing it.

Take two:

The only two reasons I can imagine for using so many smaller
blocks is that:

- The memory manager could page scanlines efficiently
  in and out of memory as they become popular and unpopular.
  But don't modern CPUs already do the paging automatically using some
  small blocksize independant of higher-level memory managers? I've
  never allocated textures in such a fine-grained manner but have never
  noticed a performance problem either.

- Each scanline and its color data can start on a padded
  address boundary. But since the data is mostly bytes
  (8 bpp per channel or even 8 bpp per pixel), I don't
  see what difference that would make.


Ray Gardener
Daylon Graphics Ltd.
"Heightfield modeling perfected"
http://www.daylongraphics.com

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