jsmorley » August 24th, 2018, 3:35 pm
A few observations...
1) There is no such thing as turning D2D on or off in 4.3. There is only D2D. What can be turned on and off is hardware acceleration.
2) D2D does indeed use more memory than GDI+. That is just a given, and although we are going to be putting in a lot of work on "performance" after we get rid of all the actual "bugs" that we can, I have no doubt that more memory is going to be used going forward. Only my personal opinion, but first, who cares, we are talking about a few meg in a sea of RAM that is 8-16 gig in size, and second, it can be argued that in a system like Windows 10, which aggressively manages memory to be as efficient as possible, any "unused" RAM is more or less pointless.
3) With hardware acceleration on (which will be the default) the difference in main RAM should be negligible. Some of the extra resources needed by D2D will be pushed over to your GPU RAM.
4) It is important that you view the RAM usage in the right way. Be careful not to confuse "Working Set", which is based on shared virtual memory, and "Working Set Private", which is the actual amount of physical RAM memory that is being used by, and is exclusive to, Rainmeter. I think you will find that "Working Set Private" won't be all that much bigger in 4.3 than it is in 4.2.
Memory usage of "Private Bytes" and "Working Set" are treated sort of as a big "slush fund", where Windows is keeping virtual memory that Rainmeter isn't using anymore "available" just in case it needs it again. Much of this is "shared" with other applications that might ask for memory, and isn't locked up with Rainmeter.
The important metric, the once that really counts, is "Working Set Private". That you should keep an eye on.
5) With hardware acceleration turned off, I don't doubt that more memory will be used. Twice as much? Hard to say, we aren't done tuning yet, but maybe... Of course 20meg of 16gig is something like 0.00125%. I'm not losing much sleep...