PureBasic Forums - English

Hi all,

If I use a PC and Win XP pro (sp3)

If I put assembler on 100% on the CPU/GPU speed scale
and I put C++ on 75%
where can I put PB on this scale ?

This is all about 3D gaming speed.
I know there is also the quality of writing programs !!

Thanks,
Marc

Probably there is no valuable speed gain in writing a graphical (DirectX/OpenGL) game in asm vs C/C++ or PB.
In many games, if you take the Render() function and substitute it to an empty function the FPS count will jump at least tenfold. Textures swapping in/out from physical memory and to/from GPU memory and the actual drawing is where time is spent. So the efficiency of the language is quite irrelevant.

Different is if you have complex physics, sound processing and the like, running on your CPU.
Or if you want (and can!) write a Quake 1 clone with a software renderer.

I would say you can reach the same performance level in PB as in any other comparable language.

So if your question is: using a BASIC language, and PB in particular can act as a drag on performance ?

The answer is no.

Anyway, quality of code is what make the difference (as you said).

Many commercial games exhibiting the A.I. of disturbed amoeba could be written in Visual Basic with a powerful GPU.


Nice site btw! I envy you the possibility (and the ability) to do all that mechanical stuff.

marc_256 wrote: If I put assembler on 100% on the CPU/GPU speed scale
and I put C++ on 75%
where can I put PB on this scale ?

You just cant scale it as simple as that.
In some cases it's slower than C++ in some it's even faster. Actualy you cant even compare it to C++, because C++ is just the language. You would need to compare it to a C++ compiler. There are differences between different C++ compilers.

If we talk about GPU, there is probably no difference as the code that runs on the GPU isnt compiled by PureBasic.

For PRACTICAL purposes I wonder if it does matter...

I got it up to 270 km/h on the 401 yesterday..

Well, my girlfriend says it's over in 1:05. Just don't tell my wife.

hello,

For PRACTICAL purposes I wonder if it does matter...

Well, if I start to write my own 3D engine/renderer it does matter.
The nice thing in PB is that I can write the most important parts in asm.

I got it up to 270 km/h on the 401 yesterday..

WAW... thats what I need...

my girlfriend says it's over in 1:05.

Marc

At about 1:27 you can see the speed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw4zn-qw1oM
and about 1:50, you can see Ogre in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzjRbA8F ... re=related

marc_256 wrote: Well, if I start to write my own 3D engine/renderer it does matter.
The nice thing in PB is that I can write the most important parts in asm.

Actualy, no.
If it isnt a software renderer it doesnt matters as the performance critical stuff is executed on the GPU anyway.

I get about the same benchmark with 4.51 as I do with mingwC/OpenGL and NASM/OpenGL loading collada models, processing input and doing some shader and bone animation stuff. They all generate about the same PE, you can mess with alignments and IAT+reloc data in all of them to save some memory, as well as stripping some stuff in code section.

Most times I see someone try to use the low-level language theory they either end up with vaporware, or poorly managed code that is worse than all the alternatives..Assembly coding is an art when you're talking about complex code algo..same with inline assembler.

marc_256 wrote:

For PRACTICAL purposes I wonder if it does matter...

Well, if I start to write my own 3D engine/renderer it does matter.

You didn't ever hear of asymptotical runtime analysis, did you? Because then you would know that you don't need this constant time optimization at the beginning. And beside this .. the bottleneck to the gpu is the bigger problem.

asymptotical

Oi! Good word to impress my friends ... well, the few that are left

(Edit) It doesn't mean anything dirty, does it?

A tool exists that shows dissasembly that is colored based on it's efficiency. I forget the name of it though. I just used kernel stats.

blueznl wrote:

asymptotical

Oi! Good word to impress my friends ... well, the few that are left

(Edit) It doesn't mean anything dirty, does it?

You may also have a look at amortized analysis and master-theorem. More interesting words, huh?

ultralazor wrote: Most times I see someone try to use the low-level language theory they either end up with vaporware, or poorly managed code that is worse than all the alternatives..Assembly coding is an art when you're talking about complex code algo..same with inline assembler.

There are some very cool assembly projects like MenuetOS and a lot of games for old computer and console systems.

Inline assembler is very usefull because PB does not optimize and does not use any SIMD instructions. It's very easy to beat PB code if you know some basic assembly optimization technics.