[EL 2.0448] Error: vkCreateImage error (insufficient video memory) *INFO*

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[EL 2.0448] Error: vkCreateImage error (insufficient video memory) *INFO*

Post by Chu »

Contacting the Evochron Legacy developer!

(All written is translated into English using translate.google, so if something is not clear, then the translator is to blame for everything) :)

(My hardware: CPU AMD FX-4320, RAM 8Gb, GeForce 650 1Gb. 1920X1080)

I've been playing Evochron since the release of Evochron Mercenary.
Purchased Evochron Mercenary and Evochron Legacy.


Hello!

First of all, I want to thank you for the excellent space simulators that gave me many enjoyable hours of gaming. Evochron Legacy was the pinnacle of the series.
That the support and development of the game continues is commendable.


Before the release of Evochron Legacy SE, everything was fine, the game worked at high graphics settings with good fps at a resolution of 1920X1080. I flew about 200 hours in Evochron Legacy with almost no crashes or problems.

But with the release of the Evochron Legacy SE, problems began. True, I had already played a little, so I did not attach importance to periodic crashes at that time.

As time went on, the game improved more and more graphically.
Recently I decided to return to the game and found that I can’t play normally, as the system requirements have increased. Now you need a video card with at least 2gb of video memory. And so the game began to crash with an error. As it turned out, most likely the crashes occur, precisely because of the lack of video memory of the video card.

You can now forget about high graphics settings, otherwise it will crash with an error at the stage of loading the game world. At medium settings, 5-10 minutes of play and crash.
At the lowest 30-60 minutes or more, but sooner or later there will be a crash.

At the same time, it is the stars background that strongly affects the crash.
If you increase the quality of the star background to medium settings, then the crash will take place in 5-10 minutes, for example, when you try to land on a planet with an error:
(Error: vkCreateImage error: -2 in main.agc at line 215993) and (Uncaught exception: Image 18 cannot be used as a texture whilst it is currently being used with SetRenderToImage).

With high quality settings, the game will crash at the loading stage with the same error:
(Error: vkCreateImage error: -2 in main.agc at line 215993).

I could live with the low graphics settings and the rarer crashes, but starry backgrounds in low quality at a screen resolution of 1920x1080 are just disgusting (muddy daub), like you're in a bank, not in endless space.
If, as an option, forget about SE, and return to the evochron_legacyb10888.1 version, then everything will be fine at high without crashes. But saving from SE will not work, that is, 200+ hours down the drain, and you won’t be able to play in the incentive, and there will be no new game mechanics.

Of course, the Evochron Legacy SE is beautiful, but still far from advanced graphics to crash stupidly with a slight lack of video memory. This is a strange decision on your part, shifted to the shoulders of the users of the game.
In the end, to solve the issues of lack of video memory, there is RAM and swap memory. Yes, this will increase the texture loading time, which will affect the FPS, additional friezes may appear, but many games, even with a large lack of video memory, do not crash, but work.

The same Elite Dangerous: Horizons works and looks quite well, although 1gb is clearly not enough, and because of this, some textures do not have time to load and remain muddy for some time. Even Elite Dangerous: Odyssey, although not viable on my computer, but with terrible friezes and 5-15 fps with a very strong lack of video memory, it still works and does not crash for a long time.

I do not demand, but just want to be able to continue playing on my hardware.
I do not insist, but if it is possible, in future updates, optimize the game (textures) so that even with low game graphics settings, but with a high star background quality setting when playing with 1gb of video memory, the game works without crashes, as it was in evochron_legacyb10888.1 and earlier.

Or alternatively, you can post the settings, textures and effects of the level that was in evochron_legacyb10888.1 as a mod - this will allow you to play as before without crashes due to lack of video memory.

Sincerely! Chu!
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Re: [EL 2.0448] Error: vkCreateImage error (insufficient video memory) *INFO*

Post by Vice »

Hello. Indeed, as noted, the minimum system specs for video memory did increase with SE to accommodate a number of visual changes and improvements. They may not be what you'd expect for such minimums, but they are needed for reliable operation if using higher detail settings and/or low video memory resources. Blurry 'muddy' textures and/or 5 frames per second framerates are not viable nor acceptable 'solutions' to me for my game.

There isn't really a way to implement the old texture formats of the older version of the game as that was one of the detail elements changed. The older version used some compressed formats that received a high enough frequency of complaints/criticisms about image quality (artifacts related to the compression) that I worked on addressing the issue for the later version and it was one of many things I set out to improve when recoding/rebuilding the game for the SE version. As a result, the new engine moved away from those compressed formats in exchange for full quality (lossless) textures, requiring a bit more video memory. Since the vast majority of players had at least 2 GB of video memory, it was a worthwhile solution to address the issue in the newer version of the game.

There are likely a few ways to reduce the overall video memory overhead using customizing options when running at 1080 that won't lower the detail too much in some areas and may free up enough memory for more reliable operation. If you complete the steps here to send me a msinfo report, I can analyze your setup in a bit more detail and try to come up with some ideas on reducing some media data to try and work more reliably on a GeForce 650 with 1 GB of video memory: https://www.starwraith.com/evochronlegacy/faq.htm#208

Some quick options in the meantime (also refer to: viewtopic.php?f=26&t=6595 ):

- If you only have 1 GB of video memory, 200-300 MB or more of it may already be getting used up by other running programs. Especially by things like web browsers. Shut down any non-essential programs to leave as much as possible for the game.

- If you are using any custom media, review sizes and quantities to see if something is increasing the video memory requirements above what is available on your system.

- If you want to keep the background star detail high, consider setting texture detail to 'Medium', turn off shadows, set Effects Detail to 'Medium', and set terrain detail to 'Low' (some of which is actually pretty close to detail/effects levels in the original 2015/2016 version of the game). Once that's done, exit the game completely and restart it to try everything with a fresh start. If problems persist, I can likely help further via e-mail with some custom options as mentioned above.
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Re: [EL 2.0448] Error: vkCreateImage error (insufficient video memory) *INFO*

Post by Chu »

All these methods do not work for me. If I hadn't tried everything, I wouldn't be posting here.
On all low settings, as soon as I set the star background to medium quality, the game crashes on the planet or when trying to respawn after death or somewhere else. On high star background settings, regardless of other settings, a stable crash when loading the world. There is no desire to play with a low quality starry background, as it looks terribly hazy.

Okay, I realized that the only way to solve the problem is with a new video card. Thanks for the answer.
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Re: [EL 2.0448] Error: vkCreateImage error (insufficient video memory) *INFO*

Post by Marvin »

So, I'm guessing you can't mod the background stars in Legacy like you could in earlier games. Or, if you could, it wouldn't make much difference in the amount of memory used.
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Re: [EL 2.0448] Error: vkCreateImage error (insufficient video memory) *INFO*

Post by Vice »

You can import custom background textures with a set detail level, but it sounds like that probably wouldn't remedy the issue for Chu. It may be that the only viable option would be upgrading the video card to something with at least 2 GB of video memory. I have a very old laptop with a 1 GB AMD GPU and things tend to work fine with it, but for some, 1 GB tends to just be insufficient.

Either way though, if you want to try a selectively compacted image set Chu, just let me know via e-mail.
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Re: [EL 2.0448] Error: vkCreateImage error (insufficient video memory) *INFO*

Post by Chu »

Vice, is it possible to somehow convert game saves from SE 20458 version to regular 10888.1?
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Re: [EL 2.0448] Error: vkCreateImage error (insufficient video memory) *INFO*

Post by Vice »

Not really backwards compatible (different feature set values, data templates, and ranges). But if you have a profile you'd like me to try and explore back porting one, send it to me via e-mail.
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Re: [EL 2.0448] Error: vkCreateImage error (insufficient video memory) *INFO*

Post by Chu »

Sent to the save game mail
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Re: [EL 2.0448] Error: vkCreateImage error (insufficient video memory) *INFO*

Post by Vice »

Profile received and it appeared to have enough of the original content left that a back port was feasible to try (which probably wouldn't be the case for many/most other profiles due to all of the differences/changes between the two save systems and available equipment, weapons, structures, value ranges, and formatting). It may still not work and have issues (definitely back up your original save games before attempting to import this one), but it seemed to load, save, and operate normally under the old version. I also sent you the test images to try with 2.X.
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Re: [EL 2.0448] Error: vkCreateImage error (insufficient video memory) *INFO*

Post by TraderDan »

I feel like Vice had to add the line:

"- If you are using any custom media, review sizes and quantities to see if something is increasing the video memory requirements above what is available on your system."

to his tech support template because of my modding shinanigens, and for that I accept full responsibility ^_^
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Re: [EL 2.0448] Error: vkCreateImage error (insufficient video memory) *INFO*

Post by Marvin »

LOL. Is there such a thing as being too verbose?
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Re: [EL 2.0448] Error: vkCreateImage error (insufficient video memory) *INFO*

Post by TraderDan »