Re: Software Architecture/Design
Brandon Van Every <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.games.devel.sweng |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 9:22 PM, Shaun Stamper <[email protected]>wrote: > Brandon Van Every wrote: > > > > On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 8:51 PM, Shaun Stamper <[email protected]>wrote: > >> Brandon Van Every wrote: >> >> You keep saying ASM lost, or is gone. Does that mean you never use it? >> >> >> It is not used for 99% of game development, and that is the point. >> >> >> 99% of game development is math. Math libraries typically need to be >> optimized down to intrinsic functions. >> > > So then at some point you simply use the library and stop worrying about > optimization because you have to get things done. 99% of your development > time is not spent writing ASM code. > > > Sure, you are spot on with 99% of time isn't spent on writing ASM code. > > My point was you can't deny the need for low level code, because someone > has to go in there and implement it so all of the slow code written by the > other hundred code monkeys goes just that little bit faster. > Look in the past I've made money doing buckets of ASM optimization for 3d device drivers, where the marketing of the 3d card lived or died by how it scored on standardized benchmarks. You can't optimize forever. If someone hands you pretty well crafted code where a lot of engineers have already tweaked it a lot, you rapidly reach a point of diminishing returns where you simply can't find performance improvements anymore. At that point you have to get lucky and find something that all the other guys missed. If lots of performance jocks were on the project already, that rarely happens. > > So your point saying that its not used for 99% of game development is > severely flawed. > Hardly. At some point the math library is done. In fact you could use a 3rd party math library if you're not deeply steeped in NIH. Do you routinely write function calls in straight ASM out of fear of the performance impact of function calls? No you don't. 99% of the time, you use C++ and get on with real work. Nobody thinks about this anymore. There was a time in the early 90s where people worried about this a great deal, and had arguments exactly like we're having now about GC. It's now almost 20 years later, technology moves on. Cheers, Brandon Van Every _______________________________________________ Sweng-Gamedev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.midnightryder.com/listinfo.cgi/sweng-gamedev-midnightryder.com