pouët.net

say.. eggbird.. i have this little question for you.

"3d acceleration is for wussies.", you stated in an early post.

do you have any more arguments to support this ultimate truth of yours? because i, and most people, probably wont get the point since it's not an argument but just a silly statement made by someone who can barely code his own starfield. you can understand this makes it hard for us to take it seriously.

please tell us more about your fantastic statement.

oh and uhm.. i would like to quote jim morrison's lament:
"FUCK YOU IN THE ASS... ASSHOLE"

goodbye egbert :)

say.. plek.. i have this little question for you.

has it ever occured to you that the basic truths of life and nature need no evidence? what's your argument for the simple facts that the sun shines, or the world turns?

or, to quote my good friends from the United Nations Headquarters, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, blablabla, bla bla, blablablablabla".

the same set of rules most obviously apply to the general rule of "3d acceleration is for wussies".

but nooo, mister plek doesn't get the point _at all_. instead, he once again refers to the namecalling and nitpicking, using offensive language, and ending with a line obviously claiming you've won the argument already.

you can't win arguments with namecalling mister de wit. (except if you're called otis ofcourse, but that's a totally different thing)

can i borrow your bible soon?
i seem to be missing out on all the good stuff!

did i mention it's rather childish to "borrow" my exclamations in order to make me look silly?

eggbird :

The sun shines because of the nuclear reaction occuring in its deep heart, which produces a whole lot of energy, some converted to light, and that light goes in every direction from the sun down to the earth.

The world turns due to the way the solar system has been created, it is a residual rotation force from the time the earth has gathered some big rocks together.

Damn, I found some arguments for these natural thingies !

So, now, try to find some argument for your sentence eggbird. If you don't like hardware accelerated 3D, it's fine, but don't insult people using it. They are probably way better than you are.

And, just one more thing : I don't see how obvious it is that "3d acceleration is for wussies". So I guess you'll have to explain yourself :)

tuo hereby receives my eternal bliss :)

LOL!

It's always a charm when eggbird falls over his own little rants, blind as a bat. That rant with the 'no arguments needed' tripe is so full of contradictions it hurts.

superplek :

that was my pleasure :)

It's always nice to read things like what eggbird wrote :)
That's so... well. I have no words to say how pathetic it is :)

Hey, what about my warning?
"I know this could start a flamewar, so in warning, be nice! :)"

And by this:
"Yeah, I see what you mean... if that last scene from 2ndReal can run on a C64@1mhz, I don't see why an 800 MHz unaccelerated PC can't do something 800 times as good. =P"

Obvoiusly, you missed the point, superplek - I didn't mean that I could make something 800x cooler than 2ndReal (that would be quite a feat...). Everyone knows that speed doesn't directly relate to coolness, but it does directly relate to how much you can do. Which was quite clear, IMNSHO. with 800 MHz, as compared to 1 MHz, you should be able to throw 800x more polygons, 800x more effects, whatever on the screen. Duh.

(Note: 800x is not the actual factor, for those who need clarification.)

"Which was quite clear, IMNSHO. with 800 MHz, as compared to 1 MHz, you should be able to throw 800x more polygons, 800x more effects, whatever on the screen. Duh."

everybody knows that cpu speed and actual fillrate are not directly related to eachother.. but okay we can easily assume that this 800 factor can be reached. what's your statement then? :)

so violent - my love

p/d

come on guys, isn't the whole discussion silly?

i mean, use the best tool for what you want to achieve. sometimes its particles, sometimes polygons, sometimes it's an iir filter, sometimes a compressor. sometimes use mods, sometimes use an mp3.

And LaserBeams, sorry to spoil your beliefs, but....

The final scene in 2nd reality C64 is an ANIMATION, and all you're actually witnessing is the depacking onto the screen :)

"...use every fscking tech what you want, use dos, wincoding, directx, opengl, jsst make it fucking good, and make me remember you..." BloB

Word up...

Fuck PC, come to CPC! :)

Oh,. yeah 2ndreality final scene is really an animation I was thinking. Let's talk about something more realtime. I am impressed with routines like wolf3d or the 243 3d dots at 50hz on Oneder demo on C64, only bad they don't have any 3d projection, but it's still impressive regarding the few cycles that remains for each frame (Unfortunatelly I only code on Z80, and I don't know how easy or hard this is, I know how few cycles are availiable on each frame, and it's still impressive thinking of how much cycles I have for each dot..)

I was always wondering if people coded in the same way on PC on X86 asm, what would happen, but nobody is gonna find a reason to do it this way as the hardware advances so fast.. I can only imagine, or take another example, have you seen Dreamcast games? I think that in CPU power it's similar to a Pentium2 300Mhz with a Voodoo2 or something, and it's games have the highest 3d detail I have ever seen! (I really love watching these cute animestyle girlies from Dead or Alive with the soooo round face and body! I have also seen Shemue (I hope I write it good..) which is the most detailed world I have ever seen perhaps! Amazing!!!)
Perhaps I am wrong, I know anymore that hardware can be diferrent, perhaps the Dreamcast is way much faster than PC, or has better custom chips, tell me if I am wrong when thinking that today's PCs are more powerfull, but anyways it does magic I have never seen on PC yet... (I think I will have to wait from JC to do some magic again! He should code demos anyways ;)


Some irrelevant questions for someone who knows, now I rememebered:

1st) Hmm,.. I was wondering about few details. I know now that C64, 6502 (or 6510? I am confused, some people say 6502, others 6510) at 1Mhz, doesn't mean that it's 4 times slower than Z80 at 4Mhz, cause of diferrent architecture. It could be around 2, cause it's 2 cycles per NOP, while on CPC it's 4 cycles per NOP. Is it right? How much could it be anyways? (Anyways,. you can't compare, as the commands change too..)

2nd) I have also heard that some effects are beeing calculated by the drive? I think but I am not sure, there was Z80 inside the drive. Or not? Anyways, what kind of CPU does the drive has, and how much additional power does it gives to the C64? I would like to know, to have an idea how really strong the C64 is... just to be aware, some general/theoritical answer. Whatever anyways..

I wrote too much. Bye!

You simply *cannot* code that way for PCs, since the hardware is not fixed and timing is different on every machine (Also, with caches, it is nearly impossible to predict the exact cycle count of a routine).

Dreamcast has a RISC architecture with custom vector operations and a graphics chip which can sort up to 16 layers of alpha transparency *per pixel* on its own... this is conditions every PC coder would dream of.

On your other points: 6510 is an improved 6502, and I'm quite sure that C64 uses 6510 (atleast most do, but possibly there's an early series that used 6502, dunno).

And the drives also have 6510s in them (originally *two* of them, this was later cut down to one for price reasons); still, they're exactly the same speed. The only problem is the floppy link cable which is usually serial and thus slooow.

ryg is right.
Coding on PC is not ONLY about perfs, its ALSO (and MAINLY) about COMPATIBILITY. Nowadays nobody can hit the hardware directly. There's dozens of 3D cards, with dozens of custom BIOSes, there's hundreds of motherboards, tens of CPU...

Well, that's just not possible anymore. On a PC you have to deal with some kind of hardware abstraction, while still trying to be as close as possible to the hardware... See the problem ? In these conditions, it's REALLY hard to use full power on a given computer. Of course it is possible, but it would require so much devel time, it's not affordable.

That's why a Dreamcast is considered as so much powerful. And that's why the XBox, despite a 733mhz "only" processor, will be used far more optimally than the same PC with same hardware. No need to find tricks that will work on every computer, no need to check caps, no need to write workarounds for lower PCs, etc.

The PC is paying the price of one of its best feature : the backward compatibility (which goes on pair with the possibility of upgrading your PC).

let's hope microsoft loosens up those xdk's.. they're a bitch to get atm. xbox unleashes so much more power than any high-end pc could at this point of time..

Sorry, my mistake about the last scene in 2ndReal.

Anyway, umm... I think this topic has outlived its original purpose. Thanks everyone for your comments, I will take them into consideration when attempting to write something cool.

-Laser

IMHO the problem is that a question like "hardware is better than software engines ?" has no meaning at all!

It's like to ask "collecting stamps is better than building wooden ships in bottles ?"

It's a matter of taste. Software rendering has some advantages agains hardware rendering, and vice versa.
Please stop shouting software rendering it's harder to do than hardware rendering, I never seen an hardware engine running slow at 320X200X256 cols (to be honest I never seen one running at that resolution).

PPL once used to plot or print graphics on paper to se "some graphics" (pick up a PDP1 and see), so also mode 13 users are taking advantage of some "hardware accellerated stuff".

I one who prefer coding both, but they are two complete different worlds, yes, maybe software rendering it's "warmer" than hardware rendering, it makes you feel "that's all mine work!". That's the only difference I find.

to optimus:
Ok, i'm not a c64 coder, but, wtf........ :p

1/ well, 6510 and z80 are just very different. true, the commands are different, but what i find one of the bigger difference is that in 6510 you use alot of indexed addressing modes whereas on z80 this kind of addressing mode doesn't truly exist. really only in e.g.:
LD A,($nnnn+IX)
On the other hand, on z80 you have many many more registers. so the way you can build up the speedcode is quite different indeed.
And also, ofcourse, different machines setup VRAM differently so certain effects can be achive more easily on some hardware. And in this aspect I think c64 is quite good because it has alot of different gfx-modes (although maybe that's true on cpc aswell, i don't know _shit_ about that).
The bottom line is really that it's very hard to do such a comparison as to compare demos from systems with so different hardware.

2/ i have no idea...

like i said
hwrendering in 320x200 looks/can look pretty much "software" :)

y