Haliken

I was trying to profile EQ's UI memory usage, but there's a glaring flaw with EQ's loading of the UI: every time I did a /loadskin, memory usage simply increased. Each successive /load default increased memory used by roughly 16 MB. Each successive /load dds_ui increased memory use by roughly 22 MB.

I've been doing all this testing on a relatively old and weak computer: 1.3 GHz Athlon, 512 MB SDR RAM, Radeon 9550. Page file is a fixed 2GB, not fragmented. There is no appreciable framerate difference between using DDS versus TGA, load times are drastically faster with DDS (the UI loads in roughly 10 seconds for DDS compared to roughly 30 seconds for TGA); again, this is an old computer and I imagine CPU power has a large bearing on the load time for TGAs as they're converted to DDS.

- Idle memory usage is at ~180 MB.
- Once EQ is loaded and at character select: ~800 MB (arbitrary amount of Luclin models on versus off).
- Once logged in with the default UI: ~890 MB (old world zone, no other players).
- Once logged in with a largely DDS UI: ~933 MB (old world zone, no other players).

These memory usage numbers were consistent across multiple sessions. Obviously, much of this memory usage winds up in my paging file since this machine only has 512 MB of physical RAM.

At first it looks damning, but remember the default UI loads for character select. It's unclear if the default is reloaded when you log in to a character (if that character is set to use the default). If not, that would explain the higher than expected difference.

At the extreme end, if a fully DDS UI consumes 50 more MB, it's a drop in the bucket compared to EQ's over-all RAM usage, and provides DRASTIC (theorhetically up to nearly 16 times the quality, texel accuracy versus pixel accuracy) image quality improvements, faster load times and an unmeasurable (with my tools) affect on performance.

Enok