Re: Software Architecture/Design

Brandon Van Every wrote:
> 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.
How many games companies have you worked at that have decided that 
performance was paramount prior to the game running at 10 frames a 
second in a release build? Unfortunately, functionality has a tendency 
to get put above performance, happens all the time.

>
> 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.

Quite often most programmers on projects aren't aware of performance 
ramifications, or often don't care because "someone else will fix it".
Its an annoying mentality that a lot of programmers really really 
shouldn't have.

Sure, technology moves on, but we still have to fit everything into a 
30hz frame. That update and render within 33ms. Unless you're aiming for 
60Hz, then you have much much less. Thats not a lot of time to do 
anything, let alone many things.

Sad reality is, as soon as you move away from your indie tetris clones, 
there are suddenly lots of systems that have to compete for clock cycles.
>
> Cheers,
> Brandon Van Every
>
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-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Shaun Stamper*
Graphics Programmer / Engine Team

	<http://www.bigant.com/>

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