Re: memory reading and writing

From: f0dder (f0dder_spicedham_at_flork.dk)
Date: 07/17/04 

Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2004 21:24:52 +0200

Beth wrote:

*lots of snipping :)*

>Then with Atari ST and Amiga machines, they typically came with
>512KB in their basic "home user" models and the disk drives were
>the same kind of 3.5 inch floppies, having more disk capacity
>than there was RAM...so, the floppy disk was kind of used a bit
>like a "hard drive"...and software - especially games - would
>commonly be written in "chunks" (say, loading each level one at
>a time from the disk when you completed each level :)...
>
And there were wonderful games like silkworm (I think - it has
been quite some years) which used DMA to load the levels in the
background, transparently, while you were playing, so there
weren't any "loading time". Try this on PC hardware from a floppy,
you'll see how much PC hardware sucks, despite high MHz rate :)

>So, you have to take things with a pinch of salt...because,
>indeed, these programmable parts on the new video cards actually
>use a kind of "assembly language"...and as they are "graphics
>dedicated" then the _general-purpose_ HLLs don't make sense for
>this type of application...so assembly language has reclaimed a
>little ground there again (until they develop special dedicated
>graphics HLLs for the video card GPUs only and the cycle starts
>all over again ;)...
>
Haven't they had this for a while? NVIDIA cG, DirectX HLSL?
I haven't looked at either, though. But a couple of links:
(warning, long URLs broken up)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/
en-us/dndrive/html/directx04152003.asp

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cg_overview_siggraph2003.html