4 ms·

Well. That’s a bit misleading. A real example: MacBook Pro m4 will have absolutely god awful performance on certain web based games * (compared to windows or e

Well. That’s a bit misleading. A real example: MacBook Pro m4 will have absolutely god awful performance on certain web based games * (compared to windows or even android), regardless of the browser or any browser performance settings. This is not the hardware explicitly, obviously it’s a very high performance chipset, but it’s definitely the hardware in terms of what the OP is asking. Because that particular hardware is falling down all over the place in this scenario when others are not. Fixing it? Sure that’s almost certainly on the games side, some kind of inefficient process or element that doesn’t work right in that environment and needs to be hammered out or replaced. But for diagnosis? Yeah, “it’s the hardware” is the right answer. And you can’t fix it without diagnosis. *replicated on latest chrome, Firefox, safari, and Brave, with the games: Idlescape and (now dead)osrsIdle ~8 months ago

jesse__ 1y ago
> Well. That’s a bit misleading. Uhh .. wut? The game appears to be similar to a point-and-click adventure game, which were popular in the 80s, and ran just fine. In 1988, a CRAY Y-MP supercomputer had "64 megawords of memory". I have no idea how large a word was on those machines, but by todays standards, that means 128MB. Let's go with that. The Y-MP was the size of two massive fridges. Now, the Macbook air OP owns, which is smaller than a toaster, has 128 TIMES as much memory in it as a supercomputer did back in 1988. Similar story for processing power, storage, etc. Point and click adventure games haven't changed all that much, and even back then didn't require a supercomputer to run. > But for diagnosis? Yeah, “it’s the hardware” is the right answer. Given the above, how you came up with this is beyond me.
- moron4hire 1y ago
  No, it's true. There can be defects in the graphics driver that make certain, specific functions in GLSL or WGSL either completely broken or woefully inefficient. It can be very dependent on hardware generation, too. One of my past projects was a very simple, photosphere-based learning environment. Photosphere rendering is incredibly simple. But on Intel processors with Iris Xe integrated GPUs used by one particular year of iMacs (I don't remember which, it only impacted 2 users and it was several years ago), I couldn't use the standard cube sampler because it was just broken. I had to split my photospheres into 6 cube faces and render 6 quads separately to be able to use the not-broken 2d sampler. The issue didn't appear on any other generation of Iris Xe on macOS and it didn't appear on any generation of Iris Xe on any other OS. It was very specifically the combination of macOS and that generation of GPU.
  - shkkmo 1y ago
    > There can be defects in the graphics driver Which is software, not hardware. Just not the software written by this dev.
  - jesse__ 1y ago
    > There can be defects in the graphics driver Yes, video drivers are, generally, buggy and unreliable. The hardware they're hooked up to is fucking amazing. Also, I can 99.9999% guarantee that this guys' problem is not a driver bug, so trying to nerd-snipe me with "but driverzzz broroooooo" is pedantic and annoying. The guy is drawing like 100 quads; it should run at a bazillion frames a second on literally a toaster.
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      > The guy is drawing like 100 quads I'm curious about this. I always had the impression, mostly from reading Shamus Young, that there's no such thing as drawing something other than a triangle. Blender guides tell you to divide your model into quadrilaterals. Though I did find one reddit post saying "I imported this model from a console game and it's all triangles. I thought models were supposed to use quads." The answer was "that model is finished, so it's in triangles because that's what you actually draw". What's going on? Is there such a thing as drawing polygons with more than three sides? Why is the current advice "use quads" to the point that people don't even realize they're drawing triangles?
      - ClimaxGravely 1y ago
        It's built of triangles so a quad is 2 triangles etc. The advice about using quads I'm not sure is really a tautology. I tend to work with quads until one of the quads is non-planar then I cut it so that when I bring it into a game engine the import/bake step doesn't triangulate the mesh in a way I didn't want it to.
        meheleventyone 1y ago
        Building out of quads is more about overall topology and the aesthetic result.
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
  Cray Y-MP had a 64-bit word size. They came with 32, 64, or 128 MWords. So 256, 512, or 1024MiB.
- sim7c00 1y ago
  its now about how the game looks its about what features it uses to do its thing and how drivers on many platforms handle them. this is also a reason why there are so many gfx driver patches which fix specific games... its usually not the hardware but driver issues. also, its infeasible for a solo dev to test on a plethora of platforms and device/driver combos, so any feedback from random internettians about performance can be really helpful to prevent breakage on platforms not available to the dev to test on.

jesse__ 1y ago

> Well. That’s a bit misleading. Uhh .. wut? The game appears to be similar to a point-and-click adventure game, which were popular in the 80s, and ran just fine. In 1988, a CRAY Y-MP supercomputer had "64 megawords of memory". I have no idea how large a word was on those machines, but by todays standards, that means 128MB. Let's go with that. The Y-MP was the size of two massive fridges. Now, the Macbook air OP owns, which is smaller than a toaster, has 128 TIMES as much memory in it as a supercomputer did back in 1988. Similar story for processing power, storage, etc. Point and click adventure games haven't changed all that much, and even back then didn't require a supercomputer to run. > But for diagnosis? Yeah, “it’s the hardware” is the right answer. Given the above, how you came up with this is beyond me.

moron4hire 1y ago
No, it's true. There can be defects in the graphics driver that make certain, specific functions in GLSL or WGSL either completely broken or woefully inefficient. It can be very dependent on hardware generation, too. One of my past projects was a very simple, photosphere-based learning environment. Photosphere rendering is incredibly simple. But on Intel processors with Iris Xe integrated GPUs used by one particular year of iMacs (I don't remember which, it only impacted 2 users and it was several years ago), I couldn't use the standard cube sampler because it was just broken. I had to split my photospheres into 6 cube faces and render 6 quads separately to be able to use the not-broken 2d sampler. The issue didn't appear on any other generation of Iris Xe on macOS and it didn't appear on any generation of Iris Xe on any other OS. It was very specifically the combination of macOS and that generation of GPU.
- shkkmo 1y ago
  > There can be defects in the graphics driver Which is software, not hardware. Just not the software written by this dev.
- jesse__ 1y ago
  > There can be defects in the graphics driver Yes, video drivers are, generally, buggy and unreliable. The hardware they're hooked up to is fucking amazing. Also, I can 99.9999% guarantee that this guys' problem is not a driver bug, so trying to nerd-snipe me with "but driverzzz broroooooo" is pedantic and annoying. The guy is drawing like 100 quads; it should run at a bazillion frames a second on literally a toaster.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    > The guy is drawing like 100 quads I'm curious about this. I always had the impression, mostly from reading Shamus Young, that there's no such thing as drawing something other than a triangle. Blender guides tell you to divide your model into quadrilaterals. Though I did find one reddit post saying "I imported this model from a console game and it's all triangles. I thought models were supposed to use quads." The answer was "that model is finished, so it's in triangles because that's what you actually draw". What's going on? Is there such a thing as drawing polygons with more than three sides? Why is the current advice "use quads" to the point that people don't even realize they're drawing triangles?
    - ClimaxGravely 1y ago
      It's built of triangles so a quad is 2 triangles etc. The advice about using quads I'm not sure is really a tautology. I tend to work with quads until one of the quads is non-planar then I cut it so that when I bring it into a game engine the import/bake step doesn't triangulate the mesh in a way I didn't want it to.
      - meheleventyone 1y ago
        Building out of quads is more about overall topology and the aesthetic result.
SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
Cray Y-MP had a 64-bit word size. They came with 32, 64, or 128 MWords. So 256, 512, or 1024MiB.
sim7c00 1y ago
its now about how the game looks its about what features it uses to do its thing and how drivers on many platforms handle them. this is also a reason why there are so many gfx driver patches which fix specific games... its usually not the hardware but driver issues. also, its infeasible for a solo dev to test on a plethora of platforms and device/driver combos, so any feedback from random internettians about performance can be really helpful to prevent breakage on platforms not available to the dev to test on.