I only have this problem on my laptop, it works on my desktop.

When I add an image using the view/image feature, the pane does not contain the image, it is just shaded gray.

It's a pretty new laptop, and my desktop is a old clunker - I'd be surprised if it was the video hardware.

Do I need a new version of directx or something?

Thanks,
Kevin

Hi Kevin, it is not unusual for laptops (even new ones) to have limited video hardware, so it is possible that is the problem.

It is probably a limitation of the amount of memory available to the video card. Those images are created using textures, and the texture image has to be uploaded to the card. If there isn't enough video memory to hold the entire texture image, you would see something like you show there.

If your image is pretty large, it is also possible that the old desktop's limitations are actually helping in this case - it is possible that your desktop video card reports a lower maximum texture size than your laptop. When MoI sees that a video card does not support a higher resolution texture, MoI will resize the image down to fit within what the video card supports, which will have the side effect of taking less video memory. It is possible that your laptop reports that it supports a high resolution image but in reality does not have quite enough free video memory to actually handle it.

Probably the way to solve it would be to reduce the size of the image in an image processing program before inserting it into MoI. Bring it down to something like 1024x768 resolution and I would think it would probably work then.

- Michael

OK. That turned out to be the problem.

The original scan resulted in a 3MB file measuring 7312x4467 at 96dpi.

When I reduced it to 50%, it still did not work, but at 10% it original size, it did display.

I suppose I could experiment to find the largest workable resolution.

Thanks,
Kevin

Yeah, that was probably a 3MB TIFF file?

The size of a black and white TIFF file can be kind of misleading, it is able to compress white areas a whole lot, like instead of storing 3000 white pixels in a row, it is able to store just one marker that says "next come 3000 of the same color".

But the texture sent to the video card is not able to handle this kind of compression, it has to expanded to full pixel size. Also right now it is expanded to full 32-bit color depth as well.

So that multiplies the size of the raw data quite considerably - 7312x4467 at 32-bit color depth adds up to 124MB fully expanded.


I should be able to tune this up a bit - instead of just trying to use the maximum theoretical texture size supported by the card, I can probably figure out some way to look at how much memory is available and resize it to fit within a more reasonable amount of memory. I'll make a note to take a look at this later.

- Michael