Better memory management for viewer

[supam.viennot]

Hi Mario,


With the Auto=0 option in the viewer's preference "How many files to loader in the background" I have quite a limitation of the viewer fluidity or even stability when working with more than 3 pictures at a time.
When forcing the option to 25, things improve a lot. It then seems that the graphic memory is extended beyond the graphic card own memory (4G in my case) and uses some of the RAM (all the way up to 16G out of 32G as i could see).

Suggestion would be
to enable numbers beyond 25 (I can always buy a bit of RAM if needed)
to change the caption that goes with the option to help users try higher numbers (for sooo many years I reduced the numbers and never had the idea to increase them. I do feel a bit stupid...)
possibly to evolve the auto option so that it considers greater use of the RAM

tks
Ph

[Mario]

The viewer loads images into the GPU RAM. Since there is no way to ask DirectX about the available RAM, IMatch fills the RAM as much as possible and stops when the card responds with "memory used up". The number of images which can be cached depends on the site of the images and the available RAM in the GPU. And if you view multiple images at the same time in the Viewer, each window has its own cached copy of files (impossible to share the DirectX caches between windows). This adds extra stress of course.

If this causes issues on your system, limiting the number of images to only 25 cached images maybe be exactly what helps your system to keep stable and fluid. Allowing for more cached images would probably have an adverse effect. I'd say stick to 25 if this works for your system and viewer layout with 3 files.