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06-07-05, 09:28 AM   #3
Beladona
A Molten Giant
 
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Join Date: Mar 2005
Posts: 539
texture load affects video memory and video performance mainly, but not enough to be a major concern. Granted having tons of textures stacked may cause issues on some systems, but overall with modern graphics, it should not be an issue unless the user is running with less than 64mb video ram.

The issue that you may run into however is script references, which utilizes system memory. That is where the 32mb AddOn memory setting comes into play. If you have TitanPanel or a similar addon that displays memory load you can see this actively, and tweak your addon to suit. For instance, my addons that are almost ready for release were utilizing somewhere around 12.5 mb average of the allotted AddOn cache, and after some tweaking I managed to get that down to 9mb. This is with ONLY my addons loaded, and nothing else (the optimal way of testing memory load in my opinion).

My suggestion is, use as few functions as you can to get by. if you have several functions in two or three addon "modules" that basically do the same thing, think about creating a single global common file, and have each module reference one function instead.

Any frame element that has a name uses a script reference, and as a result, a table that goes along with it (describing details about that element). The more you have that are named, the more load you put on system memory and AddOn memory.

So yeah, don't worry so much about video load as much as script memory and processing. If someone encounters slowdowns due to video / texture load from your addon, then they need to think about upgrading anyway, as I doubt wow runs superb for them...
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