Am 09.01.2013 02:59, schrieb H. S. Teoh:
On Wed, Jan 09, 2013 at 12:21:05AM +0100, deadalnix wrote:
On Tuesday, 8 January 2013 at 16:12:41 UTC, Benjamin Thaut wrote:
My impression so far: No one who is writing a tripple A gaming
title or engine is only remotly interested in using a GC. Game
engine programmers almost do anything to get better performance on
a certain plattform. There are really elaborate taks beeing done
just to get 1% more performance. And because of that, a GC is the
very first thing every serious game engine programmer will kick.
You have to keep in mind that most games run at 30 FPS. That means
you only have 33 ms to do everything. Rendering, simulating
physics, doing the game logic, handling network input, playing
sounds, streaming data, and so on.
Some games even try to get 60 FPS which makes it even harder as
you only have 16 ms to compute everything. Everything is
performance critical if you try to achive that.
That is a real misrepresentation of the reality. Such people avoid
the GC, but simply because they avoid all kind of allocation
altogether, preferring allocating up-front.
Interesting, that sounds like the heapless programming of the old, old
days where you map out everything beforehand, and limit yourself to use
only what is there. Y'know, with fixed-sized arrays, stacks, etc., fixed
maximum number of objects, etc.. Not a bad approach if you want to
tightly control everything.
Well, except that you do have preallocation, presumably during runtime
at startup (and between game levels, perhaps?), so it's not as rigid,
but during gameplay itself this is pretty much what it amounts to,
right?
T
No its not heapless programming. You just try to avoid allocations
during gameplay. But they are done if needed (or if there is no time to
do it the "clean" way)
Kind Regards
Benjamin Thaut
