Comment by arcticfox
10 years ago
The wink face makes it seem like you think this is easy because using a GPU to execute the program is allowed. No?
Edit: just read your other comment about real challenges in the C64 subset of the demoscene. That's like "You set a record in a 1600m race? For a real challenge, set a record in a marathon." It's just arbitrarily moving the totally legitimate goalposts to a different challenge because you prefer it.
How much harder would it be if software rendered or on a simple GPU from the late 90's? Their executable still 4KB? No?
>How much harder would it be if on a simple GPU from the late 90's
It would be impossible since pixel shaders didn't exist until the 2000's ;-)
As for software rendering: Since a pixel shader is essentially a program executed for every pixel, it's trivially portable to the CPU: Just turn it into a function and call it for every pixel on the screen. Making it fast is another matter altogether though.
Nitpicking: in the offline rendering world RenderMan had shaders ca. 1990[1], and graphics hackers got around to compiling those for research GPUs in the 90s too[2]. (Hardware had programmability equivalent to current shaders early as well [3], but no compilers for fancy shading languages)
[1] https://people.csail.mit.edu/ericchan/bib/pdf/p289-hanrahan.... [2] http://www.cs.unc.edu/~olano/papers/pxflshading.pdf [3] http://www.cs.unc.edu/~pxfl/papers/high-speed_rendering.pdf
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"It would be impossible since pixel shaders didn't exist until the 2000's ;-)"
Lmao. You got me there.
"Just turn it into a function and call it for every pixel on the screen. Making it fast is another matter altogether though."
I was imagining it took up many MB of memory and massive cycles even on a multicore CPU. Suddenly, one faces tough decisions about organization, resolution, primitives, techniques used, algorithms, and so on. Gets really, really hard to make tiny and fast stuff without that GPU doing heavy lifting. :)
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Response to edit: more like they couldn't pull it off so they asked people to buy a better graphics card. That's in their own race. Then I pointed out doing graphics operations, mostly rendering, almost entirely on a graphics card designed for that was barely an accomplishment vs stuff like in C64 demoscene. .kkrieger had me way more impressed due to all the elements involved vs size. So, I suggested subsetting or constraining the graphics card so its hundreds of millions of transistors don't just hand people their victories. Plus allow more creativity.