iPhone OpenGLES: Textures are consuming too much memory and the program crashes with signal "0"

Question

I am not sure what the problem is. My app is running fine on the simulator but when I try to run it on the iPhone it crashes during debugging or without debugging with signal "0". I am using the Texture2D.m and OpenGLES2DView.m from the examples provided by Apple. I profiled the app on the iPhone with Instruments using the Memory tracer from the Library and when the app died the final memory consumed was about 60Mb real and 90+Mb virtual. Is there some other problem or is the iPhone just killing the application because it has consumed too much memory? If you need any information please state it and I will try to provide it. I am creating thousands of textures at load time which is why the memory consumption is so high. Really cant do anything about reducing the number of pics being loaded. I was running before on just UIImage but it was giving me really low frame rates. I read on this site that I should use OpenGLES for higher frame rates.

Also sub question is there any way not to use UIImage to load the png file and then use the Texture class provided to create the texture for OpenGLES functions to use it for drawing? Is there some function in OpenGLES which will create a texture straight from a png file?

Answer 1

thousands of textures? really? how many of them are on the screen at one time? perhaps you can only load some of them at a time, or if they're small, you should combine them into fewer larger textures.

the general guideline I've heard is that you are limited to 24MB of texture memory.

there's nothing built into OpenGLES that loads from disk, but you can use a file parser like stb_image to do it yourself.

Answer 2

I tried load as ten texture pieces of 2048x2048 pixels. Texture memory exceed 24MB, but iPhone3GS is able to loaded and rendered it.

I also recommend stb_image or SOIL texture loader. (stb_image library is used SOIL library.)