: I'm on a duel G4/450 with 1.5G of RAM and an original Radeon. The only major
: slowdowns I notice are right at the beginning of a level (when it is still
: loading textures, presumably), and for some reason around media (sewage,
: etc), but not all of the time around media. It still doesn't play as fast
: as original Marathon did, but then I've got 130 hires 512x512 true-color
: textures per set, so that's... about 65MB of stuff in VRAM for just the
: textures. It's mostly the graphics card that's the bottleneck: I'd
: recommend over a 64MB card (better than mine, basically) for good
: performance with the highest res textures.
I've noticed this slow-down around fluids in a lot of Marathon scenarios - I believe it's the ambient sound of the fluid and not the textures that cause this slow-down.
Regarding the VRAM requirements - you're really pushing it with your hardware. Fortunately, I finally have a decent graphics setup - a new 17" PB with 128MB VRAM. I'll look forward to playing the first chapter when it's released.
A reminder to those with limited hardware - you can dramatically improve performance by switching from 32-bit true color to 16-bit indexed color. You won't noticed a major difference in image quality except with gradient textures, which will have discrete boundaries reflecting quantization of smooth textures. Still, a very good tradeoff that will halve the VRAM requirements for loaded textures. I've gotten by this way with only 8MB of VRAM for the past 3 years. Note that you may also need to play with the color bit-depth in the individual texture settings within OpenGL. Another thing you can try if necessary, is to halve the resoluton of the landscape textures, since you won't be getting close enough to notice the pixelation.
