That's a similar configuration to mine, with an added discreet GTX 660M 2GB card. But you should have plenty of video memory.
Ah, excellent! After changing the texture settings to 2048, turning texture packs on, upping game res to native res (1080p), it crashes joining a pcore5 game, never make it into the lobby. Much better than not being able to recreate the crash on my machine. I'm gonna see if I can get this to happen in offline mode or if I'll have to try and run my own server. But at any rate I hope to get this happening under a debugger.
Can't get it to crash in the training missions. The texture size only seems to really kick in after a quit and restart. If my max textures where at 2048 (from previous run) when I launch, then it always crashes. If I drop it to 1024, I can launch, and then if I up it to 2048 without quitting and relaunching from ACSS I'm also fine (Hard to tell if the resolution is actually 2048 or 1024).
Additional note, with texture packing on, sometimes at 1024 max I get wierd artifacts where the rocks and bases will flicker in and out.
The above was using my Intel HD4000 GPU.
When I switch to my Nvidia GTX660, I always crash at 2048 textures, and always crash at 1024 if texture packing is on. I can run with texture packing on at 512.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that texture packing is texture atlasing? Combining smaller textures into larger ones? At any rate, this is definitely a video memory issue, not an MDL file issue or bug. I'll see what I can do to pin down the exact cause, but my guess is just simply that there are too many high res textures at 2048 for 2GB cards and they just fail to allocate memory at some point, and alleg just doesn't take that kindly.
Also, changing your settings to your test condition and then exiting completely and restarting seems to be the key to reproducability. I'm guessing that the graphics settings for visual quality require a restart. We should probably put something to that effect in the client as well, so that people don't up their settings and then wonder why it still looks like @#(!.
Lastly, for the high quality environment textures, do we have the source images? Are they 32 bit? I'm pretty sure the mdl compiling process drops them to 16 bit, which makes the colour range much less and introduces the really ugly banding that you see on the nebulae. I might be able to fix the mdlc program to stop doing that. 32 bit cards weren't common in 2000 either.
