Q. Are there any limits to the size of textures that Evans & Sutherland Freedom can use ?

A: Yes, with the current product all rendered textures must be stored in hardware texture memory at each processing node in the Freedom. There is a simple formula to work out how many textures of a given size will fit in to a particular hardware configuration. There are E&S utilities (under /usr/ES/diag) to display the hardware configuration. The formula is given in the "AVS for Freedom" release notes (extracts enclosed below).

> AVS Information: oversize texture 2048x2048
>                  max level is 10, max side is 1024

AVS for Freedom has several features to manage textures. It allows you to downsize textures to fit in texture memory and has an automatic function which will downsize existing hardware textures when a new texture would overflow the memory. It will automatically rescale resident textures as space becomes available again. With these functions you can choose how to compromise between number, size and resolution of textures. The bottom line is that if you're willing to sacrifice resolution, you can put as many textures as you like in hardware memory.

That particular message is printed when the (AVS software) limit for textures is set to 1024, i.e. every texture larger than 1024 will be downsized to 1024x1024 before being loaded. In this case it doesn't guarantee that it will fit, you may still get an error, the "auto decrement" feature should be used for guaranteed loading.