Comment by holoduke
4 years ago
Because a rule of thumb is to not focus too much on performance in the beginning of a project. Better a completed project with some performance issues, than a half product with hyper speed. The key thing with development is to find somekind of balance within all these attributes (stability, performance, loo, reusability etc) In case of FS simulator. Not sure what the motives were. Sure that they had some serious time constraints. I think they did an acceptable job there.
Agreed. As someone who spends most of their time on performance related issues, it's important to keep in mind that sometimes performance issues are strongly tied to the architecture of the program. If the data structures aren't set up to take advantage of the hardware, you'll never get the results you're hoping for. And setting up data structures is often something that needs to be thought about at the beginning of the project.
Completely agree on rule of thumb and can't doubt they had their motives. It is no way that simple.
Then again isn't it like 101 of game development?
Imagine releasing a game that looks stunning, industry agrees that it pushes the limits of modern gaming PC (hence runs poorly on old machines). Fast forward some time - "oh BTW we did it incorrectly (we had our motives), now you can run it on old machine just fine, no need of buying i9 or anything".
Because it's never that obvious, it's not really 101 of gamedev to move everything to the GPU.
You know your target specs but where the bottlenecks are and how to solve them will be constantly shifting. At some point the artists might push your lighting or maybe it's physics now, maybe it's IO or maybe networking. Which parts do you move to the GPU?
Also a GPU is not a magic bullet, it's great for parallel computation but not all problems can be solved like that. It's also painful to move memory between the CPU and the GPU and it's a limited resource can't have everything there.
True. Performance is not issue if no one is playing it.