Comment by TillE
9 months ago
CPUs are way way faster, but RAM latency has barely improved in the past couple decades. That's why cache-optimized systems like ECS can still be a dramatic improvement when you're simulating a lot of stuff. Like, thousands of active objects.
They can be improvements, but you can do Data-Oriented Programming without ECS systems, i.e. Structure Of Arrays, which is what we often using in Rendering/Simulation for VFX for SIMD/GPU compute...
But similarly, ECSs can be slower, if they don't have some optimisations, i.e. spatial data structure lookups: just using a generic ECS "database" system without any first-class spatial knowledge / acceleration structure lookup ability, is likely going to be slower.