ok , i made a final test just for see if ram usage ingame is influenced by the menu screens before entering ingame.
The test took place on gwx with
only one mod installed, my 1680x1050 ui.
The ram usage (in both cases) is measured when i was at att periscope station in torpedo training mission at the exact same ingame time.
The first pic is showing the ram usage with all menu screens at 32-bit
Then,i pushed all menu screens to the extreme less i could make them ( decrease color depth to 2 colors only black/white ) and left everything else (which appearing ingame) untouched.
The second pic is showing the measure of ram usage at this case
From the results, i see that menu screens are not influencing the ram usage ingame so i don't believe that from menu screens could be any gain at the ingame ram usage.
Something that i noticed from the case of reduced depth of images is the faster loading time to get me into the main screen (propably becuase of the very lower mb that they had in total).
What do you think ? is my way of checking menu screens valid ?
EDIT: I am wrong, i think i figured out what is going on but i have no solution yet. There is no difference in RAM usage at my previous test becuase the quality of images is also altered via menu.ini at their MatFlags and TexFmt lines and ,as i didn't changed these lines at the test, the output was the same in both cases.
By changing the matflags i saw a difference of about 20mb at ingame ram usage so it seems that you are right at the statement that menu screens are also loaded even ingame.
As i never figured the logic behind the Matflags and TexFmt i picked up a combination (MatFlags=0x21 ,TexFmt=0x9) that worked excellent in all images.But now it seems that these values are responsible for ram wasting so must become understanable.
Searching for such code , i found this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/...-notation-mean
but it seems that sh3 devs have built their own logic on these mysterious "0x..."
Maybe anyone around here knows something more to enlight