Rainbow and Grey Texture Bug
by Devin Passage · in Torque Game Engine · 04/26/2009 (1:14 am) · 5 replies
Hey folks, I was long plagued by this bug and finally found the explaination, if not so much a solution.
The exact problem is when using NVIDIA onboard video cards, very common these days in value PCs and laptops, the terrain textures turn spontaneously after startup into grey shaded rainbows (its an oxymoron, but you can see it in the picture :) ).
The reason is that you are trying to move too much texture volume and should reduce the size of your textures on these systems. While onboard video does allow for extreme amounts of texture without causing a huge perf drop due to swapping(which does happen when you run out of texture mem on a card), it will screw up the performance of the textures in this manner. I lowered my texture footprint to be sub 256, which it really ought to be anyway, and the problem went away. Yay. Now the question is how to set up a pref to knock texture sizes down for sub 512 cards.
The exact problem is when using NVIDIA onboard video cards, very common these days in value PCs and laptops, the terrain textures turn spontaneously after startup into grey shaded rainbows (its an oxymoron, but you can see it in the picture :) ).
The reason is that you are trying to move too much texture volume and should reduce the size of your textures on these systems. While onboard video does allow for extreme amounts of texture without causing a huge perf drop due to swapping(which does happen when you run out of texture mem on a card), it will screw up the performance of the textures in this manner. I lowered my texture footprint to be sub 256, which it really ought to be anyway, and the problem went away. Yay. Now the question is how to set up a pref to knock texture sizes down for sub 512 cards.
About the author
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#2
its *kind* of a moot point because these video cards are very low-end and will not run my game very well anyway. Certainly I am sure(and hope!) higher end shared video hardware works fine (Xbox 360? hello :) ) but with very very low end shared cards such as this one, it was an issue, and some people had experienced it also and I just wanted to share my knowledge.
04/26/2009 (1:00 pm)
our total texture memory footprint was close to 400 megs (translation: Way, way too much), not just high quality terrain textures. Likewise, just reducing terrain tex quality did not fix this problem. its about total texture throughput i think.its *kind* of a moot point because these video cards are very low-end and will not run my game very well anyway. Certainly I am sure(and hope!) higher end shared video hardware works fine (Xbox 360? hello :) ) but with very very low end shared cards such as this one, it was an issue, and some people had experienced it also and I just wanted to share my knowledge.
#3
I kind of have to agree with Caylo's comment about overheating because on my laptop with onboard nVidia graphics, and it's a low-end entertainment notebook, I'm averaging close to 800 MB for texture memory (sometimes more -- up to 2GB!) and I've never seen that, only a consistent slowdown with certain shaders turned on, regardless of texture size. My desktop is ATI based and I've never seen it there either.
04/26/2009 (1:27 pm)
Is that in TGE or TGEa? I ask because I haven't used TGE on this comp.I kind of have to agree with Caylo's comment about overheating because on my laptop with onboard nVidia graphics, and it's a low-end entertainment notebook, I'm averaging close to 800 MB for texture memory (sometimes more -- up to 2GB!) and I've never seen that, only a consistent slowdown with certain shaders turned on, regardless of texture size. My desktop is ATI based and I've never seen it there either.
#4
I target GF8000 class video cards as my 'LOW END' and even with TGEA and 64megs dedicated ram for the 8200 with the 512x512 set of textures I do not receive any artifactting, and the FPS is no lower then 20's in windowed 1024x768 mode.
Im truly not sure what my video ram max footprint is.
04/26/2009 (1:30 pm)
I target GF8000 class video cards as my 'LOW END' and even with TGEA and 64megs dedicated ram for the 8200 with the 512x512 set of textures I do not receive any artifactting, and the FPS is no lower then 20's in windowed 1024x768 mode.
Im truly not sure what my video ram max footprint is.
#5
04/26/2009 (1:39 pm)
Ah, I get something similar to that effect on my crappy intel laptop when running TGEA. Now I know the exact cause. I'd been wondering about that, cheers! 
Torque 3D Owner Caylo Gypsyblood
What it honestly looks like to me is RAM error, or overheating. Are you perhaps overclocked?