Support Level 10 loading is slow

[ryan]

When i load orbiter, i use Lvl 10 earth textures and it takes a while maybe a minute to load the textures to move onto the moon textures. Does anyone have a slow load time when using 10, and could anyone help me speed up the load time of 10, or maybe orbiter as a whole. It goes normal speed when im using a clean orbiter, without 10.
Thanks.
Ryan.

 

[tl8]

Level 10 textures are quite large when extracted (DDS can be compressed into pretty much nothing)

It is normal for Orbiter to take a minute to load when I use Level 10.

 

[TSPenguin]

Depending on wich level 10 you use, you might not have enough RAM, leading to the use of swap space.
For Seth Edens Level 10 you need at least 1 GB!

 

[tblaxland]

For Seth Edens Level 10 you need at least 1 GB!

I second that. I can run the L10's from here on my 512MB RAM just fine, but Seth Eden's L10's give me about 1-2 fps!

 

[Usquanigo]

I found L10 (Seth Eden's in fact IIRC) to be very slow to load on a P4 3.2GHz with 2GB of RAM - on 2 nearly identical systems. 1 with XP Pro and a GF6600 (256MB), and the other with Vista Enterprise and some older Radeon thing.

However, in both cases, the C drives were nearly full. When I freed up at least 3GB, load times drastically improved.

Something else I did with the XP system was move the Orbiter install to the mirror set (a RAID 1 handled through a PCI card, used for data only). I'm not sure, but I beleive this helped as well, since it is off the drive and drive *controller* which the swap file is on.

 

[TSPenguin]

If swap is used, then loading the data from a different drive than that is beeing swapped to increases performance tremendously. Depending on the quality of the controlers in question, using two different ones can increase performance too.

I have been using Seth Edens textures on several computers with 2GB RAM and load times mirror the harddrive speed pretty well. No swap necessary.