Hmm.. it must be even harder to develop for such a fragmented platform as the personal computer, then, where there is essentially nothing guaranteed except the OS you are writing for.
It is really hard. John Carmack has been talking for years about how much easier it is to get good performance out of a console, where the hardware is a known quantity, than on Windows, where you have to make really difficult tradeoffs based on the dozens of differences between hardware configurations.
iPhone is easier like consoles. Android is harder like PCs.
I'm not a hardware guy, but it's been my understanding that this is why drivers exist. Drivers are a nightmare, though. I don't miss dealing with them.
Drivers may provide you semantic uniformity over a diverse set of hardware, but I think Sweeny sounds more interested in performance guarantees, which they may not be able to provide, depending both on the hardware and how well the driver has been optimized.
erikpukinskis|15 years ago
iPhone is easier like consoles. Android is harder like PCs.
elliottkember|15 years ago
pohl|15 years ago
geon|15 years ago
Having a uniform interface for all hardware is great, but doesn't solve the specific problem here.
There are so many variables that affects performance. Some of them are:
* Graphics card fillrate
* Graphics card memory size
* Graphics card buss speed
* CPU speed
* CPU cache size
* RAM Size
* RAM speed
* Optical disk speed
* Harddrive speed
* Harddrive cache size
You need to make tradeoffs based on how they affect your particular application.
bonch|15 years ago