Don't get me started guys! Suspects (might have no improvement, might be all the difference in the world): - Their 'all in one binary' means that aside from the math functions they specifically program, 90% of code is generated for a featureless i486 platform. Providing an advanced binary that's all -msse2 -mssse3 -ffast-math/etc might have a massive improvement. - fPIC might be lagging the call heavy binary and clobbering a register causing issues. - The engine spends about 8% of its time in bitbuffers. Reading a int out of a bit buffer requires loading 5 bytes, applying a mask, bitshifting them, adding them. A more intelligent data structure might reduce this by a factor of 10 (or, again, have no effect) - Realtime scheduling in linux yields absolutely massive performance increases, though the linux scheduler is generally regarded as pretty good. Something about how their frameloop expects/yields CPU time could probably use some tweaking. - Real 64-bit binaries would eliminate context switches, making gettimeofday a virtual syscall, and probably do everyone a lot of favours. Oh, and fPIC on 64-bit has almost no performance penalty.
And so on. Maybe valve has already looked at all these things and found no improvement, but we'll never know - Neph _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
