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Descriptions like these makes me wonder how we ever made a single computer game with millions of polygons that are in view or not and must be rendered according

by WA 4y ago

Descriptions like these makes me wonder how we ever made a single computer game with millions of polygons that are in view or not and must be rendered accordingly.

jb1991 4y ago
Well at least what you describe would be sitting on a GPU using all the technologies (both hardware and software) developed for precisely that purpose. Also keep in mind that the battery drain using those technologies to play a game does not scale to a normal mobile app when people expect their phone to be available all day.
avianlyric 4y ago
Completely different problem. Rendering millions of polygons is almost trivial to parallelise, and there’s plenty of hardware around that’s capable of providing the needed parallel compute. You’ll note that games have loading screens, those exist so the games can get everything it needs into working memory, order it to enable extreme levels of parallelism. And only then do you get buttery smooth 60fps, and games, of course, stutter and jump if they need to dynamically load new content in, but can’t quite get it into working memory before it’s needed for rendering, usually resulting in entire frames being delayed. Scrolling on the other hand is a very sequential task, if you don’t want to have a loading screen before displaying the list. The location of every item in the list depends on the location and size of the item before it, those data dependencies make parallelism pretty close to impossible. Made worse when each item is loaded on demand, and needs to execute code to determine how it should be rendered. Of course, you could load all your scroll data into memory, precompute all the needed render parameters, arrange the results for parallel rendering, then have blazing fast and stable scrolling. Just like a video game loading screen, but then every scrollable view would have a loading screen…
- sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
  Filling polygons has never been the hard part of realtime games. It's all the work that gets you to be able to fill just the polygons you need in the way you want them. It is not a big ask to have a scrolling UI. Look at motif from 80s.

by WA 4y ago

Descriptions like these makes me wonder how we ever made a single computer game with millions of polygons that are in view or not and must be rendered accordingly.

jb1991 4y ago

Well at least what you describe would be sitting on a GPU using all the technologies (both hardware and software) developed for precisely that purpose. Also keep in mind that the battery drain using those technologies to play a game does not scale to a normal mobile app when people expect their phone to be available all day.

avianlyric 4y ago

Completely different problem. Rendering millions of polygons is almost trivial to parallelise, and there’s plenty of hardware around that’s capable of providing the needed parallel compute. You’ll note that games have loading screens, those exist so the games can get everything it needs into working memory, order it to enable extreme levels of parallelism. And only then do you get buttery smooth 60fps, and games, of course, stutter and jump if they need to dynamically load new content in, but can’t quite get it into working memory before it’s needed for rendering, usually resulting in entire frames being delayed. Scrolling on the other hand is a very sequential task, if you don’t want to have a loading screen before displaying the list. The location of every item in the list depends on the location and size of the item before it, those data dependencies make parallelism pretty close to impossible. Made worse when each item is loaded on demand, and needs to execute code to determine how it should be rendered. Of course, you could load all your scroll data into memory, precompute all the needed render parameters, arrange the results for parallel rendering, then have blazing fast and stable scrolling. Just like a video game loading screen, but then every scrollable view would have a loading screen…

sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
Filling polygons has never been the hard part of realtime games. It's all the work that gets you to be able to fill just the polygons you need in the way you want them. It is not a big ask to have a scrolling UI. Look at motif from 80s.