4 ms·

It's pretty remarkable that, for efficient data processing, it's super super important to care about memory layout / cache locality in intimate detail, and this

• efuquen 5y ago
  > Yet somehow this is fairly obscure knowledge unless you're into serious game programming or a similar field. Because the impact in optimizing hardware like that can be not so important in many applications. Getting the absolute most out of your hardware is very clearly important in game programming, but web apps where scale being served is not huge (vast majority)? Not so much. And in this context developer time is more valuable when you can throw hardware at the problem for less. Traditional game programming you had to run on the hardware people used to play, you are constrained by the client's abilities. Cloud gaming might(?) be changing some of that, but GPUs are super expensive too compared to the rest of the computing hardware. Even in that case the amounts of data you are pushing you need to be efficient within the context of the GPU, my feeling is it's not easily horizontally scaled.
  • Gigachad 5y ago
    TBH I don't think cloud gaming is a long term solution. It might be a medium term solution for people with cheap laptops but eventually the chip in cheap laptops will be able to produce photo realistic graphics and there will be no point going any further than that
    • themacguffinman 5y ago
      Photo realistic graphics ought to be enough for anybody? This seems unlikely, there's so many aspects to graphical immersion that there's still plenty of room for improvement and AAA games will find them. Photo realistic graphics is a rather vague target, it depends on what and how much you're rendering. Then you need to consider that demand grows with supply, with eg. stuff like higher resolutions, even higher refresh rates.
      • Gigachad 5y ago
        There are diminishing returns. If a laptop could play games at the quality of a top end PC today, would people really want to pay for an external streaming service, deal with latency, etc just so they can get the last 1% of graphical improvements? We have seen there are so many aspects of computing where once it’s good enough, it’s good enough. Like how onboard DACs got good enough that even the cheap ones are sufficient and the average user would never buy an actual sound card or usb dac. Even though the dedicated one is better, it isn’t that much better.
        • 0xCMP 5y ago
          I think what you're missing is that 1) you still need to install and maintain it and there are many trends even professionally that want to avoid that 2) just cause you could get it many may not want it. I could easily see people settle for a nice M1 MBA or M1 iMac and just stream the games if their internet is fine. Heck, wouldn't it be nicer to play some PC games in the living room like you can do with SteamLink? 3) another comment brings a big point that this unlocks a new "type" of game which can be designed in ways that take advantage of more than a single computer's power to do games with massively shared state that couldn't be reliably done before. I think to counter my own points: 1) I certainly have a beefy desktop anyways 2) streaming graphics are not even close to local graphics (a huge point) 3) there is absolutely zero way they're gonna steam VR games from a DC to an average residential home within 5 years IMHO.
          • Gigachad 5y ago
            I think the new macbooks are more a proof that cloud streaming won't be needed. Apple is putting unreal amounts of speed in low power devices. If the M9 Macbook could produce graphics better than the gaming PCs of today, would anyone bother cloud streaming when the built in processing produces a result which is good enough. I'm not sure maintenance really plays much of a part, there is essentially no maintenance of local games since the clients take care of managing it all for you. Massive shared state might be something which is useful. I have spent some time thinking about it and the only use case I can think of is highly detailed physics simulations with destructible environments in multi player games where synchronization becomes a nightmare traditionally since minor differences cascade in to major changes in the simulation. But destructible environments and complex physics are a trend which came and went. Even in single player games where its easy, they take too much effort to develop and are simply a gimmick to players which adds only a small amount of value. Everything else seems easier to just pass messages around to synchronize state.
    • opportune 5y ago
      Cloud gaming allows for more shared state and computationally intensive games (beyond just graphics). Maybe eventually clients will easily be able to render 4k with tons of shaders but the state they’re rendering could still be computed remotely. In a way that’s kind of what multiplayer games are like already
  • opportune 5y ago
    IMO we are only scratching the surface of cloud gaming so far. Right now it’s pretty much exclusively lift-and-shift, hosted versions of the same game, in many cases running on consumer GPUs. Cloud gaming allows for the development of cloud-native games that are so resource intensive (potentially architected so that more game state is shared across users) that they would not possible to implement on consumer hardware. They could also use new types of GPUs that are designed for more multi tenant use cases. We could even see ASICS developed for individual games! I think the biggest challenge is that designing these new types of games is going to be extremely hard. Very few people are actually able to design performance intensive applications from the ground up outside of well-scoped paradigms (at least web servers, databases, and desktop games have a lot of prior art and existing tools). Cloud native games have almost no prior art and almost limitless possibilities for how they could be designed and implemented, including as I mentioned even novel hardware.
    • jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
      I've thought about this off and on, and there's certainly interesting possibilities. You can imagine a cloud renderer that does something like a global scatter / photon mapping pass, while each client's session on the front end tier does an independent gather/render. Obviously there's huge problems to making something like this work practically, but just mention it as an example of the sort of more novel directions we should at least consider.
    • Animats 5y ago
      If the "metaverse" ever gets anywhere beyond Make Money Fast and reaches AAA title quality, running the client in "the cloud" may be useful. Mostly because the clients can have more bandwidth to the asset servers. You need more bandwidth to render locally than to render remotely. The downside is that VR won't work with that much network latency.
• ip26 5y ago
  The logical conclusion is that most fields have so much data processing capacity relative to the problem size, they don't need to worry about efficient data processing.
• drivebycomment 5y ago
  It is physics that is the cause behind the memory latency. As such, the fundamental aspect of this won't go away ever - you can randomly access small amount of data faster than you can do a much larger amount of data. This is because storing information takes up space, and the speed of light is limited.
• pizza 5y ago
  Differentiable programming is becoming more and more popular. If there were accurate models of memory/cache behavior, we could predict how code changes would change performance due to CPU behavior, and might be able to get programming tools that can make this way more visible to people who don't know about it. But I have my doubts it will be as easy as I make it sound - and I don't think I make it sound all that easy either :)
• toxik 5y ago
  Why can’t we abstract over this and optimize per system in runtime?
• tsimionescu 5y ago
  I'm always disappointed that no one has come up with a more realistic model for asymptotic time complexity comparisons, one using a computation model with asymptotically increasing memory access times. It's a pretty sad state of affairs when the main way we talk about algorithm performance suggests that traversing a linked list is as fast as traversing an array.