4 ms·

> 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 f

by jesse__ 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo ago
  > There can be defects in the graphics driver Which is software, not hardware. Just not the software written by this dev.
- jesse__ 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo ago
        Building out of quads is more about overall topology and the aesthetic result.
        sim7c00 11mo ago
        this is what i thought too. its sort of easier to see if ur topology is good / efficient. atleast for me.
      - sim7c00 11mo ago
        opengl can do dots, lines, triangles, quads, ngons. just an option in the drawcall. pretty sure dx and vulkan will be the same but i didnt try em... what is more optimal.. idk. maybe under the hood past the drawcall it will triangulate it. never bothered to look into that. pretty sure the HW doesnt care one bit as it operates on vertices... not primitive shapes. (ofc like u note if ur quad is non planar it wont look like u expect but thats no concern for the driver or hw..)
SAI_Peregrinus 11mo ago
Cray Y-MP had a 64-bit word size. They came with 32, 64, or 128 MWords. So 256, 512, or 1024MiB.
sim7c00 11mo 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.

by jesse__ 11mo ago

moron4hire 11mo 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 11mo ago
> There can be defects in the graphics driver Which is software, not hardware. Just not the software written by this dev.
jesse__ 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo ago
      Building out of quads is more about overall topology and the aesthetic result.
      - sim7c00 11mo ago
        this is what i thought too. its sort of easier to see if ur topology is good / efficient. atleast for me.
    - sim7c00 11mo ago
      opengl can do dots, lines, triangles, quads, ngons. just an option in the drawcall. pretty sure dx and vulkan will be the same but i didnt try em... what is more optimal.. idk. maybe under the hood past the drawcall it will triangulate it. never bothered to look into that. pretty sure the HW doesnt care one bit as it operates on vertices... not primitive shapes. (ofc like u note if ur quad is non planar it wont look like u expect but thats no concern for the driver or hw..)

SAI_Peregrinus 11mo ago

Cray Y-MP had a 64-bit word size. They came with 32, 64, or 128 MWords. So 256, 512, or 1024MiB.

sim7c00 11mo 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.