Re: Battle Field audiogame
And, just to bring some numbers into the discussion:
Doom was released in 1993.
in 1995, the top supercomputer in the world had around 200 gigaflops of computing power according to this. It looks like we hit 1 teraflop in 1997: source.
A modern top of the line NVIDIA GPU, just one of them, has 100 teraflops of performance: source
A typical home computer in 1995 looked something like this. In the early 2000s people were still under a gigabyte of ram. Nowadays it's hard to get a laptop with less than 4 gigabytes.
It is hard to find numbers for home PCs, but if you want a good-seeming table, there's this one. Looks like a home PC in the 90s would top out around 200 megaflops at best. The issue is that home pc performance depends on temperature among a lot of other things. A modern microprocessor can get up to 16 floating point operations per clock cycle, but usually 8 in practice; you have 4 cores nowadays; frequencies are 2 GHZ. This gives around 127 gigaflops through simple multiplication, or 1200 times faster than our 1990s systems and over half as powerful as our 1995 top-of-the-line supercomputer (and I know someone is going to say but technically this isn't a supercomputer; go down that list a ways). Also, you can get up to at least 8 cores in a home system, 16+ if you're willing to spend rather a lot of money.
If I went back in time with my laptop, I would be laughed out of the room when I tried to explain how powerful it was. If someone believed me I could probably sell it for on the order of anywhere from $10 million to $100 million.
And finally, the system requirements for the original Doom (which shades of doom is, minus the graphics) were 4 megabytes of ram and an Intel 486 source.
So, seriously. I have watched threads like this one for 5 years where people decide that performance matters before writing anything, or based off stories of other people that had problems without bothering to use more basic algorithms than can be found in the game equivalent of hello world for collision, or etc. What will it take to get the community to stop caring about performance? These discussions are pointless. Pick a programming language that you like and write a game. It will be fast enough, and if it's not then that probably just means you need to learn a better algorithm for your physics or something.
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