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 CAD / Development / Organizations / LDraw / 4528
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Subject: 
Re: New LDConfig.ldr color file
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw
Date: 
Wed, 12 Aug 2009 23:17:38 GMT
Viewed: 
16847 times
  
In lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw, Eric Albrecht wrote:
   In lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw, Travis Cobbs wrote:
   I have a few comments here. First of all, if you’re going to load a huge model in LDView, it’s usually best to set its “Memory Usage” setting to Low (especially on old hardware). Secondly, as has been pointed out, LDView takes a lot longer to load models than L3P, but after they are loaded, they can be examined at much higher speed (although not once they cause LDView to have to swap).


This makes me curious as to how this Memory Usage feature works. Why would I set the memory usage to “Low” if I have plenty of RAM? What does this do for me?

The main effect that this setting has is its control over the amount of display list compilation used. Display lists are a feature in OpenGL (the graphics library used by LDView) for drawing static objects. They convert (compile) the data into an internal format that the graphics card is more efficient at rendering. My understanding is that this compiled data is also usually stored directly in video memory.

I can’t remember with absolute certainty, but I believe that Low produces no display lists, Medium produces a display list for each part, but not for anything above the part level, and High produces a display list for every part, plus every sub-model in the model, plus the main model.

As it turns out, display lists use a lot of memory, both PC main memory and graphics card video memory. So it might be useful to set to Medium or Low even if you have plenty of system memory, because if they don’t all fit into the video memory, things slow down.

--Travis



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: New LDConfig.ldr color file
 
(...) Thanks for the explanation. Since my computer at work (which I am using) is a high end CAD workstation with enough VRAM to display a billion polygons, I guess I should just leave it on HIGH! On my home machine, I will probably slow it down. (...) (15 years ago, 13-Aug-09, to lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw, FTX)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: New LDConfig.ldr color file
 
(...) This makes me curious as to how this Memory Usage feature works. Why would I set the memory usage to "Low" if I have plenty of RAM? What does this do for me? Eric (15 years ago, 12-Aug-09, to lugnet.cad.dev.org.ldraw, FTX)

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