4 ms·

Worse, they didn't actually get a 15% speedup. They reduced the frame time from 16.7ms (around 60FPS) to 15.3ms (around 65 FPS), which is only a speedup of some

Worse, they didn't actually get a 15% speedup. They reduced the frame time from 16.7ms (around 60FPS) to 15.3ms (around 65 FPS), which is only a speedup of something like 7%. They didn't seem to mention how much they're actually utilizing the remaining cores either. From the look of it, they've basically parallelized a couple of loops in the renderer. That strikes me as being the wrong way to go about this, especially considering that modern AAA games apparently break everything down into tasks, and run the separate tasks in parallel (idTech5 apparently does this, for example).

to3m 14y ago
p21 in the white paper suggests the speedup is ~2x, for the parts that were actually parallelized. That's more interesting (well, to me) than the rather limited increase in overall frame rate. You may be right that they are doing the wrong thing, but I think the fact it's doable at all is reasonable evidence that their tool is useful. I'm pretty impressed that somebody who's totally unfamiliar with the code is able to jump in and start parallelizing stuff - particularly if they've never worked on a game before, and so might not have any real idea where would be a good place to start, or how things are likely to work. Maybe my standards are too low. (Those screwy HUD textures might be evidence that they managed to get it completely wrong, of course ;) - or maybe it's just something simple.)
- BlackAura 14y ago
  Good point. Their tool is obviously useful, even though something like this might not be the best use case for it. The HUD thing - it looks like they screwed up the post-processing effects somehow. As far as I remember, the original game did apply post-processing effects to the HUD. Probably something to do with OpenGL not getting a decent way to do render-to-texture until 2005, so they'd have had to use the previous frame's render buffer. It wasn't that noticeable in the original though.

to3m 14y ago

p21 in the white paper suggests the speedup is ~2x, for the parts that were actually parallelized. That's more interesting (well, to me) than the rather limited increase in overall frame rate. You may be right that they are doing the wrong thing, but I think the fact it's doable at all is reasonable evidence that their tool is useful. I'm pretty impressed that somebody who's totally unfamiliar with the code is able to jump in and start parallelizing stuff - particularly if they've never worked on a game before, and so might not have any real idea where would be a good place to start, or how things are likely to work. Maybe my standards are too low. (Those screwy HUD textures might be evidence that they managed to get it completely wrong, of course ;) - or maybe it's just something simple.)

BlackAura 14y ago
Good point. Their tool is obviously useful, even though something like this might not be the best use case for it. The HUD thing - it looks like they screwed up the post-processing effects somehow. As far as I remember, the original game did apply post-processing effects to the HUD. Probably something to do with OpenGL not getting a decent way to do render-to-texture until 2005, so they'd have had to use the previous frame's render buffer. It wasn't that noticeable in the original though.