The fact that msvc generates the unaligned loads for every avx instruction but gcc didn't gave me so many headaches. Most people worked on PC or Xbox and I was on the Playstation team.
"oh boy, another one of these..."
Yes! It's one of those cases where when you've seen it before and know the catch with the instruction (probably vmovdqa) then you'll immediately recognise it. If you don't know it, it's very very mysterious. Why on earth Intel decided to make a handful of instructions require alignment is also a mystery to me.
Sweet mama speed. Although from what I understand it is more legacy speed cause you're losing all your time to fetching the memory anyway. But when processors were slower it was a meaningful amount.
I hear these stories of black magic bugs and I look back at my 8 year career wondering if I'm even progressing as an engineer. Thrown from one studio to the next and never truly staying long enough to be trusted to investigate such issues.
I have no idea how engineers that started in the 10's or 20's are going to rise up to take over those fro the 90's/00's. So much is abstracted, but games specifically need to understand what's under the hood. Because they can and will hit some of the nastiest edge cases.
rwmj|1 year ago
jbosh|1 year ago
fweimer|1 year ago
johnnyanmac|1 year ago
I have no idea how engineers that started in the 10's or 20's are going to rise up to take over those fro the 90's/00's. So much is abstracted, but games specifically need to understand what's under the hood. Because they can and will hit some of the nastiest edge cases.