Resource management

I was wondering how much difference improving my resource management would make to my applications performance. I use a lot of Sprite animations in my game, that use D3DXSprite. With the animations I know that once I have displayed a frame that image won't be needed again for a while and also know which texture I will want for the next frame. So I wondered how much difference it would make to performance if I wrote a system that would Lower the Priority level of used frames and PreLoad frames that I knew were going to be used in the next frames. Also, if I have displayed a texture frame is there a way to evict that texture from memory
Can anyone shed any light on any of this

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Resource management

Jewels
"But I have seen it once or twice (in about 6 months of perfect working) start failing to draw some of the larger textures."

That sounds more like a driver bug to me. I'm not sure there's a lot you can do about them, except try to get a repliable repro case to the IHV concerned.
Doug Maynard
Resource management is essential if you want good performance from Direct3D. Fact.

However, despite saying that, unless you are performance limited (CPU or GPU) you might not see much advantage in overall performance.

I would strongly recommend that you use PIX for Windows to profile your application - pick a set of counters that reflect resource usage and/or state changes and see what it comes up with.

Do this before you start changing anything. Firstly you'll be able to judge whether it's much of a problem and secondly you can use it as a base-line to compare any changes to (it's very easy to implement a "better" resource system that stalls the pipeline somewhere and actually ends up doing more damage than good...)

As for actual suggestions - you haven't specified enough detail really... At a guess you're using C++ and DX9 (which SDK/version ) - correct

You should be able to use IDirect3DTexture9::PreLoad() and IDirect3DTexture9::SetPriority() with managed resources to tweak the built in resource management functions. A slightly severe option to remove them might be IDirect3DDevice9::EvictManagedResources().

You might appreciate the Resource Management Best Practices article from the SDK.

hth
Jack
AJB123
Thanks

I am using C++ with DirectX9. I havent updated to the August version yet as I havent got the time yet to go around changing all of my sprite code.

The reason for my asking about the resource management is becasue I am working on a game that is set to run on a fixed platform that has a 64Mb graphics card. The game has two applications to it, running simultaneously on different monitors. The total amount of texture memory needed for the two apps combined is about 400MB. Generally I dont have any problems and it all runs smoothly. But I have seen it once or twice (in about 6 months of perfect working) start failing to draw some of the larger textures.
I can only think that the reason for this is becasue the larger texture it fails to draw can't be loaded into memory. Other textures draw fine at the same time.

So I was thinking of spending some time enhancing my resource management to ensure the textures I require are loaded and evicting textures I know wont be used again. Future projects will be on the same platform and I was looking to get more ou of them so was looking for ways to improve the performance with the platform that I have got.

There is no 3D work involved it is purely 2D Sprites.
Resource management

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