The effect of vidram on stability

Hi,

I was showing our latest product at and noticed the game suddenly crash and bring the explorer a little bit in disarray (had trouble finding MyDocuments). After a quick glance at his computer (XP, 512Mb dx8.1a), I noticed he had a 32Mb Matrox 550(??) installed. The game was alway tested on the target systems which are equipped with GeForxe440MX 64Mb cards.

My question is can an "overflow" of vidram destabilize the computer?

Thanks in advance

Steven Manschot

Possibly ;-]

It is possible - however I think that what you ran into was possibly another problem, I have seen windows do that twice, it seems a rare bug and I can't recall what triggered it last time.

Matrox cards are a bit strange, I had one for a while, and there are some things you have to do slightly differently in Blitz3D (from memory I can only remember that you can't create tris using only 2 verts - for line systems). But it could be the memory as you say.

Are you forcing anything into VRAM?

Also, does the Matrox card support DDS textures? Might give you a memory saving.