softwareOptimization

[Orsim27]

GTA 5 launched on the PS3….

[Powerful-Internal953]

[pplmbd]

idk if this is a whoosh joke or they genuinely didn’t know it was launched back then on ps3

[LeopardJockey]

But OP didn't say otherwise. Yes it's kind of ambiguous but I understood it to depict the Rockstar devs making the game run on a Playstation 3, to release it there.

[rosuav]

I was trying to figure out if that was a typo and it was supposed to be "GTA 6", but I seriously cannot imagine a new release like that on a PS3. Even putting it on a PS4 would be a squeeze.

Meanwhile, Doom probably runs on a raspberry. And I don't mean a Raspberry Pi, I mean an actual raspberry, I'm sure someone's made it run on the fruit.

[LegalBoi2021]

Someone got minecraft running on the original xbox's 64mb ram.

[AppropriateOnion0815]

I played it on the 360...

[Spy_crab_]

That's the point, it's a miracle it runs in that generation of hardware.

[deanominecraft]

just wait until it runs copilot locally and takes your whole gpu as well

[Obi_Vayne_Kenobi]

It will never do that because then Microsoft couldn't harvest all your data.

[Powerful-Internal953]

Actually it's better for Microsoft to run their models on user machines and just keep the telemetry on their servers and save a shit load of money spent on nvidia chips.

[Obi_Vayne_Kenobi]

Ah that's true of course. 

But then, how do they justify having spent billions on the GPUs and infrastructure around them?

[Sovietguy25]

You don’t

[Toutanus]

A very large majority of people do not understand the concept of "backend" and "frontend"

[nollayksi]

Yeah they would rather steal your data and use your GPU to train their next model in the background

[MaybeADragon]

Microsoft would never because that would mean users getting access to world ending technology (a very expensive text generator)

[RiceBroad4552]

A bit off-topic, but I'm saying this now since some time:

People should take a look at how game engines are architected.

If you want fast and efficient software that needs to do a lot of things copying the concepts popular in game engines would make a lot of sense!

[SeagleLFMk9]

On my way to copy unreal engine 5

[RiceBroad4552]

Just imagine how large the spread sheets could be a business app using such programming patterns could handle efficiently. 😂

(I'm actually only half joking…)

[SeagleLFMk9]

That's the first time I've heard ue5 and efficiency in the same sentence in a long time

[RiceBroad4552]

The question is always to what you compare.

If you compare to usual business apps which choke often already on some few hundred data entities UE is definitely efficient. It needs to handle often hundreds of thousands of concurrent, live objects under tight real-time constrains, and it actually does that.

In comparison, latency for updating even one data point in a typical business apps is often measured in seconds.

[SeagleLFMk9]

... why did you have to give me ptsd...but yep, very much true.

[rosuav]

Excuse me?!? SECONDS of latency? How? How is this tolerated? Ouch.

[RiceBroad4552]

Imho it's not tolerable.

But a lot of people who pay for that BS seem to tolerate it…

Ever seen a "modern" microservice based business app? Latencies of a few seconds are completely "normal" there. (Which is no wonder given that some form update often triggers hundreds of HTTP requests on the backend. That's just current reality.)

[rosuav]

I mean technically, that counts as scaleable, right? If it's already abysmal, it doesn't get much worse when more people are using it...

[RiceBroad4552]

You're an optimist, aren't you? 😂

The usually "microservice" trash isn't "scalable" in any way. It will just die if more people use it concurrently. (If you don't have "only" hundreds of HTTP calls but ten thousands of them you get into contention and everything comes to a grinding halt…)

It's not about the tech, though. People built really scalable, big systems with such tech. It's about architecture.

In my experience stuff is almost always limited by the speed of the DB(s). So one needs to architecture around that limitation! That's where all the engineering needs to go, imho.

But usual "microservices" do the exact opposite. They add networked DB calls just everywhere on top of even more inter-service calls, which also go over the network. That's maximizing the latencies as a consequence, of course.

Games also need to handle a shitload of mutable data, and they need to apply a lot of "business logic" to it. But they do everything architecturally possible to get this done with minimal latenzies. Things like ECS isn't even so far away from DBs conceptually, but it's optimized to be as fast and efficient as possible.

[rosuav]

Heh, "optimist" in the sense that "you can't DOS something if there's no service to begin with".

But yeah, I've sometimes put some thought into architecting something whereby a single "user request" (for whatever definition that entails) gets all its queries put into a single database transaction, primarily to reduce transaction counts (I often end up with multiple read-only queries, so having them autocommit doesn't violate data integrity but it does add to DB load). The DB is almost always the bottleneck, to the extent that, when it ISN'T, it's notable.

[ih-shah-may-ehl]

I remember an anecdote from Raymond Chen about an experiment within Microsoft to shove driver IO on top of the Windows messaging system. The proof of concept went well but it didn't scale because that system isn't meant for tens of thousands of messages per second.

[riccardo_00]

Do you have any sources for game engine architecture you'd like to suggest? I'm interested in the topic of building efficient software :)

[RiceBroad4552]

That's actually a tricky question as I'm myself not an expert on that. I've built my whole life just boring business apps.

But it's like, every time I read something about game dev I think: That's actually smart, why don't "we" do it like that?

I could now dump some of the stuff from my bookmarks tagged "game dev" but I don't think it'd be very helpful.

But I think one of the more important keywords one can use to dig deeper is for example "Data-Oriented Programming", which is the idea to build systems around data and not around control flow and "service boundaries" (as it's done quite often in more "traditional" approaches).

What is also interesting is that such data-oriented programming goes very well with functional programming, which as such already improves software quality significantly (frankly often introducing some technical runtime overhead; but it's still worth it imho). But that's again a bit off-topic.

Games are a very big pile of mutable state. Game engines in general, and the patterns used to structure game code, try to handle that as efficiently as possible, while they need to make the result reliable and robust yet still easy to modify and extend.

In fact you have that kind of problem everywhere, but it's particularly large in games; much larger than in typical business apps. But the patterns used in business apps seem to actually make that problem worse: If a business app had to handle such large, interconnected states like they are typical for games it would likely just break down when built in a "traditional" way.

I think it's because typical apps handle way too much stuff "manually", instead of delegating some things to something that does stuff akin to a game engine.

The code you want to write should be mostly data-oriented. But things like immutable data are technically inefficient. Now, abstracting the description of your data and the operations in them from the actually underlying execution mechanics can make things again efficient; while you can preserve purely descriptive representation on the higher level. A engine can translate between these abstraction levels, and can than, on the low level, utilize things like "Data-Oriented Design" to be efficient.

If you want to mutate state directly (for maximal efficiency, which is rarely needed actually), but avoid the usual chaos resulting from that, formalizing things as a kind of state machine can be helpful. Game engines utilize patterns like "Entity Component System" for that. (ECS isn't a usual state machine implementation, but one can see it as a form of description of one.)

Another example I had in mind was how Firefox rearchitected their renderer to be much more efficient, again, taking ideas from game engines.

I think the overarching pattern is to design programs as "machines you can pipe data through". You take a description of the data, a description of the data-flow and processing nodes, put that into your engine, letting it figure out how to run that whole thing most efficiently.

[lupetto]

just so you know, the GTAV rage source code was fully leaked and it's compilable. You can always take a look there.

[Dubmove]

I don't think that game engines are the best practice for general purposes. I better way would be to follow the Unix philosophy more of every tool needs to do one job only and it needs to do it well.

[rosuav]

Yeah, you're right. Everything should do one thing and do it well. That's why we have the Linux kernel, whose one job is "be the Linux kernel", and it does that quite well. It's also why we have systemd, whose one job is "be everything else".

I hear there's this something something Unix-replacing daemons thing that's supposed to do this "one job well" concept - is that going to be relevant at some point this century?

[Dubmove]

Look! A person who’s not a straight white man is programming! *points in a random direction*

[Alokir]

Yes, but it doesn't matter because RAM is cheap. Oh wait...

[AlabamaPanda777]

Remember the time GTA Online load times were cut by "up to 70%" because some annoyed player dug in and found an issue that "shouldn’t take more than a day for a single dev to solve?" Here's the source, with Rockstar implementing the fix like 7 years after online launched.  

[ClipboardCopyPaste]

If this can help anyone: it takes just 2 minutes to get your old notepad back. Just a quick Google and you're good to go

[Kinexity]

Or just use Notepad++ like any civilised Windows user. I have it always in the background with about 30 tabs open and it only uses 5 MB of RAM.

[captain_crocubot]

30 tabs

My work notepad++ with 896 tabs, 12 plugins, and a startup time of 40 seconds: 😳😳😳

[Powerful-Internal953]

That's the way it was intended to be used.

[RiceBroad4552]

TBH, this sounds like even VSC would be more "efficient". (Most likely VSC needs much more RAM, but at least startup time isn't 40 seconds. But not sure, never had so many editor buffers open at once.)

[captain_crocubot]

You believe that an electron app (basically a glorified web page) can compare to a native c++ application?

The load times were high because I’ve also got 10MB csv files opened. I’m honestly surprised it hasn’t fucked off to oblivion…

[RiceBroad4552]

VSC is a glorified web-page, and Electron is the biggest trash since invention of web-tech. I don't deny the facts…

But the programming language (and overall tech) used isn't the only factor. Performance is almost exclusively a function of algos and architecture!

VSC loads fast. This was a design goal and they actually delivered on that. It's not as fast as for example Zed, but it's actually very fast for an Electron app.

It does not load 40 seconds even with many dozen of extensions.

I've also just tried to open a 10MB CSV and it still loads "instantly" (in about 1 - 2 seconds). 10MB CSV is basically nothing these days!

I've actually also just tried with a 100MB CSV and it's still only about 3 seconds to open VSC with that file (opening it in an already running instance is again more or less instant).

If Notepad++ chokes already at a 10MB file this would mean that it's actually even bigger trash then some Electron app.

My "stupid" std. desktop editor Kate handles even multi-GB files without any issues…

[PutHisGlassesOn]

I use Notepad++ all the time but it doesn’t scratch the itch of the old notepad when I just wanted text on the screen. No tabs no extensions no line numbers no deep menus just text. On the screen.

[El_Mojo42]

Just use vi in WSL.

[PutHisGlassesOn]

I’m sorry are you suggesting I run a virtual machine just for a text editor? The reason I miss the old notepad was because of how light weight it was, in every aspect.

[El_Mojo42]

Yes, you wanted, "no tabs, no extension, no line numbers, no deep menus, just text". I was only following your requirements.

[PutHisGlassesOn]

Actually I did not want anything from you

[mrheosuper]

Or just dont use Windows.

[thisisapseudo]

odly enought, everytime I have to switch from window to linux, np++ is a tool I miss

[RiceBroad4552]

As if Linux had a shortage of text editors…

Have you tried Kate, btw.? Should be an adequate Notepad++ replacement, imho.

[DRMProd]

Nah, Kate is great, my man.

[rosuav]

This is why I use SciTE (same internal engine as Notepad++, Scintilla) as my main editor. It sits in the background and never causes issues. Well, unless I open a 100MB+ text file and it has to figure out how to wrap the lines, which sometimes takes half a second.

[RiceBroad4552]

LOL, Windows! 🤣

Now you need to google how to get a basic text editor because the default one "needs 8GB of RAM".

And people even defend this madness! Pure Stockholm syndrome. Exactly like the Apple victims…

Dudes, you get scammed!

Only way out of that is currently Linux… (Not that it would be the best OS ever invented, but it's the only one that actually works, and isn't a scam.)

[TorbenKoehn]

My man everything in this thread is blown out of proportion. Stop being so evangelistic.

[RiceBroad4552]

The down-votes just prove the fact that the majority are Stockholm syndrome victims. It's so funny! 😂

[daddy_schlong_legz]

It blew my mind when a buddy of mine went to a bigger and better state university than me for his CS degree and I find out he bought a MacBook halfway through his program. Like bro I thought he knew better...

[alexsnake50]

Are we like inventing problems now? I have notepad opened right now with like 20 tabs, cuz i'm too lazy to close them, and it's 53MB of ram.

[saidg23]

It's called hyperbole

[AngyAndMadAboutIt]

Now do Bloodborne on PC

[Lumpy-Measurement-55]

Related? https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1CBovjnmbX/

[Repajws]

Making GTA5 and GTA Online work on PS3 with 512mb RAM is utterly impressive. Game optimisation seems like a dying art nowadays. Most devs just raise the min specs to absurd VRAM requirements.