Choosing texture size

[none]

Hi,

I have an application (not a game) that needs to run on any PC from a
1990's-era laptop to a high-end modern gaming rig. So the available
texture memory could be anything from a few MB to several GB.

The nature of the application is that it dynamically creates many simple
textures. They are created based on user interaction, so there is no way
to predict the number that will be created. It's typically somewhere
between 20 to 200.

Because these are created dynamically, I can choose the size for each. I
want them to be large (2048x2048 or 16MB) on a system with gigabytes of
video memory to spare, but small (256x256 or 256KB) on an older system with
only a few megabytes. Most systems will fall somewhere in the middle of
that range, obviously. And it would be ideal if the size could gradually
reduce as memory fills up.

The bottom line is that I'd need to know the amount of free video memory,
but what I've read suggests that there isn't a reliable way to do this,
except possibly on Windows 7 using GetAvailableTextureMemory().
Unfortunately, I need this to work on XP.

Thanks for advice.

[none]

I just did a little experimentation with GetAvailableTextureMem() and it
seems to work fine on XP. Guess I should have tried it myself before
believing what I read.

Thanks.