Martin Spedding's Blog

Adventures in a disconnected world

Some more information on the Managed Quake II code

I was looking around for some more information abut the porting of the Quake II engine to Visual C++.Net and I came across this interesting newsgroup entry from David Notario,Software Design Engineer, CLR JIT Compiler

http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&group=microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.performance&selm=O1eXvxKSDHA.3796%40tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl

I thought these comments were interesting :

" This version doesnt use any 3d hardware acceleration at all, which is
good, because it's interesting to see the performance of the .net platform
and not the performace of the graphics card. In graphic apps/demos/games
that use 3d acceleration, expect the difference between managed and
unmanaged code to be smaller (as the bottleneck of rendering is the 3D card,
not the CPU).

- With this benchmark, you are measuring the quality of the codegen, as the
managed version is just a recompile of the unmanaged version with the /clr
option (which targets IL instead of x86). It's not taking in account GCs
that happen in an app that does managed allocations,  it's a pure JIT
benchmark (ie, this also means that it doesn't show some problems you may
have doing realtime graphics with managed code if you're not careful, such
as dropping frames due to GCs)"

I wonder if David has blog ? It would certainly be interesting to hear more from him.

Update via Brad Adams Blog:(http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/brada/permalink.aspx/5c36f535-565e-42ec-9d98-2f9ff307f66b): David Notario has a blog(http://www.xplsv.com/blogs/devdiary/) but no rss feed. I hope he gets one as it makes life so much simpler. Brad maybe you could convince him to use Blogx. Thanks

Comments

David Notario said:

I added rss feed and comments ;)
# July 22, 2003 3:29 PM

igor1960 said:

This is so funny: MSFT guys are willing to distort facts in order to market CLR/.NET.

"This version doesnt use any 3d hardware acceleration at all..."

In fact Quake II uses OpenGL library, which by default utilizes 3D hardware installed. But even if not using harware: 3D rendering is performed by unmanaged and highly optimized code. So, points made by MSFTs David Notario are just absolute absurd and laughable.

Amazing... and primitive.
# September 22, 2003 7:37 PM

leppie said:

I cant believe so many people fell for such a marketing gimmick. And then having MSFT back them....
# September 23, 2003 3:36 PM
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