I meant work as in compiling work, when you are used to 65W X86 the ARMs stand no chance. My 3D MMO engine compiles in 2 seconds on my Windows PC but it takes 10 seconds on Raspberry/Jetson, enough that I decided to build a 45W Atom computer to try the inbetween... with 25W CPU and 20W GPU!

Even if that would mean I have to "port" the engine to linux/X86. Until now I just had windows/X86 and linux/ARM!

> when you are used to 65W X86 the ARM stand no chance.

My m1 mac says hi! :)

Yes, it says hi and then when you want to upgrade the disk/RAM you can't. And when it breaks you can't fix it and Apple sells you another one for bazillion dollars. And you have to use Metal instead of OpenGL. That's when I say goodbye until they reverse engineer the GPU and port OpenGL to it! :D

Now I didn't even mention the App store tie in and how you need to sign the binaries on Apple hardware and how they poach 30%, but you get the picture.

You just moved the goalposts to another planet. Your initial comment was about wattage and ARM performance.

Not to mention that plenty of x86 hardware has also ditched socketed components.

> And when it breaks you can't fix it and Apple sells you another one for bazillion dollars.

I’f you’re lucky enough to live in a country with consumer protection laws (NZ is one), Apple will fix if for you for 3-4 years. So you pay the fortune you mention and then a bit more to cover this feature.

None of that is even remotely related to your initial point.

OpenGL is a legacy API. Metal, Vulkan and Direct3D 12 are the APIs that can actually saturate modern hardware.

Really those APIs bring nothing useful to the table.

OpenGL (ES) 3 with VAO was the last feature that really moved any interesting goalpost (to reuse that phrasing since we have a tree structured comment field to move those around) for games.

Most new protocols are just job security.

Edit: Also calling something that just released in hardware (OpenGL ES 3) legacy is kinda weird.

Maybe wait a decade or two?

Performance is very useful. OpenGL’s design precludes it.

Now I can reply to your comment (what is going on hn, why is there a timer on the reply button the deeper you get?)

Performance with the low level APIs are not something that competes with OpenGLs higher level API, they are complementary; eventually there will be OpenGL drivers written in Vulkan!

That said, I have yet to meet anyone that can give me a practial example that affects gameplay where Vulkan (or Metal/DX12) makes a difference!

Also last but not least fragmentation is bad, I rather support OpenGL (ES) 3 on all platforms than port to those 3 new APIs.

Timing is what is going on. If you want to reply directly, click the timestamp.

edit: the timer is there probably for flamewar prevention. Maybe for general discussion quality too.

Sure, OpenGL can be implemented on top of the native efficient APIs.

The biggest problem with OpenGL is the state. It severely affects CPU usage and limits parallelism options. The second problem is poor handling of buffers.

It hardly matters, anyway. Vulkan, D3D 12 and Metal are very similar and almost always used indirectly through a game engine that can take advantage of them.

I'm writing my own 3D MMO engine from scratch, so it does matter to me: http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=5959519327505901449

Unity and Unreal are so bad. I mean compile for 30 minutes? To use them is to have technical debt way beyond what is healthy.

So why can't you make OpenGL stateless? It seems to me multithreading is really bad on the new APIs too, you'll have to trash memory with a bunch of buffers that then gets submitted by one thread causing motion to photon latency!

RdR2 had like 10 frames of lag! Completely unplayable.

I prefer direct/forward rendering one one thread and make the graphics simpler instead. Graphical fidelity is not important to make a fun game, just look at Nintendo.

If your graphics are atypically simple, it hardly matters.

For the vast majority of games that compete on graphics, you need to use modern APIs to take advantage of modern GPUs.

Sure, but I also out-scale all other engines both server and client:

http://talk.binarytask.com/task?id=579711216639635462

My server is the first MMO system to handle 10.000 concurrent action players on one machine: http://fuse.rupy.se/about.html

You have to pick your battles.

10 seconds? What disk were you using?

How will you ever get those 8 seconds back??

It's almost never a IO bottleneck, the amount of code is too small for it to be IO.

8 seconds x 1 million compiles = 92 days!

When you code action games you want to iterate quickly to make the controls and physics as good as possible.

I made a .dll/.so hot-deploy system to be able to work effectively, so I can hot-deploy the game in <1 second on the Raspberry but then on the PC I do it in 100 microseconds!

I think that kinda proves the parent comments point, since all the apps were re-written for mobile.

No, not everything requires a complete rewrite. The browsers for example benefit from code reuse. The UI is another matter. Wrapping and rewriting is a given on the system side, though.

are you saying phones are running general purpose OS and apps?

yes. Browser, youtube, video calls, docs, games, there isn't much they can't do.

They can’t be used for local development, so hard to consider them a general computing platform. They are more akin to consoles than PC.

Thonny runs well on my Pinebook Pro, so in that case comparably wimpy ARM based Linux machines can be used for things like Python development even with an IDE.

It just depends on how heavy-duty what you're trying to do is. Scripting in general runs fine on my ARM SBCs. The real trouble is if you've got something that you need to recompile every time you make a change and you don't have a cache set up.

The tooling isn't particularly nice, but on Android it is clearly possible.

If I wanted to programm I could get a shell on a server for example.

Now touch screen keyboards are a different problem.

When I see truth being downvoted I try to upvote, hn would be a better place if people learned to upvote, the high karma downers are really toxic.

You need a keyboard and mouse to be productive, case closed!

Edit: see the toxic high karma downers even got to this one!

Meta commenting on comment voting is against the HN guidelines and tends to get downvoted. Please review them again.

Jesus christ this place is toxic by design.

I bet you the high karma people click on your profile to see how much karma you have before they push you down.

Eventually the HN database will leak, it's inevitable, I'll make sure to grab a copy then.

Abstractly speaking, yes. I notice the limitations on mobile of course, but you cannot deny the potential.

I'm barking up the wrong tree, am I? sorry for the misunderstanding