Turbine Games Q&A/Graphics/Q-94

Original Link (now dead) - http://www.turbinegames.com/qa/view_questions.html?id=5543

Dose AC have a problem with 64mb cards?

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Asked:	2001.01.10
Name:	Xen
Question Title:	Dose AC have a problem with 64mb cards?
Category:	Graphics
Question:	Hi, i have a voodoo 5 5500 and i run ac on the 'full' graphics setting, and get the low graphics memory message sometimes for no reason and a couple min. later i see white trees/prople/iteems everywhere, i was wondering if AC had a problem with 64mb cards or if its the card.

Answered:	2001.01.12
Name:	Jason Booth
Answer:	If I recall correctly, the Voodoo5 5500 with 64 megs of ram on it actually acts as if it were a 32 meg card. This is because it's basically acting like 2, 32 meg cards, working in tandem to produce an image. Your video card actually stores two copies of every image, and two frame buffers, which are combined for the final rendering. By default, 3dfx's cards run with a special work around to a bug in 3dfx's drivers that we discovered just before ship. In the latest drivers, this bug should be fixed. Because this work around takes multiple images and attempts to combine them into texture pages, it can sometimes use a bit more memory than the source textures alone use. Turning this option off should save a bit of memory and increase quality slightly - type "@render texpage off" in the chat window to disable the workaround. That said, even though a 32 meg card should be enough to run everything on full, in crowded scenes with lots of people, you can actually produce more than 32 megs worth of textures.