"JSchloss" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> Also, it
> seems like POVRay loads textures to ram on parse - it it possible to keep
> POVRay from loading the entire texture to ram at once?  A performance hit would
> be better than dieing for lack of ram.

What good would that do, actually?

POVRay dying from lack of ram usually means not enough physical RAM, leading to
use of virtual RAM and consequently death by swapping. Or, to put it
differently, death by excessive HD access.

Leaving textures on disk would just be choosing a different mechanism to create
a lot of HD traffic.

So I guess loading the texture into memory at the *risk* of starving from
swapping is still better than leaving it on disk and being *sure* of starving
from excessive HD activity...

The only viable option would be to load a low-res version of the texture into
RAM. But then again, you can just as well crunch down the texture in the first
place.


Then again, if you're thinking of deferring loading of the texture until it is
first used - well, it *will* be used some time during render, so you're better
off with POV-Ray dying during parsing already, than waiting for the first time
the texture is actually used, and *then* dying from an out-of-memory condition.

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