A few questions...
Just a few questions...
1) If anybody happened to be daft enough to program an entire game in complete assembler, where would they begin...i.e. are there links to tutorials for opening 3d models in assembler? Also, is there a noticable increase in speed compared to a game programmed in C/C++?
2) Right...I'm not fully sure on this questions details, but anybody with the required know-how will get the drift...I hope! Graphics cards are measured in vertices per second, does that mean that's how many it can draw? For example the new GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, has 388 million vertices per second, does that mean I can have:
97,000,000 squares on the screen at a time, each one rotating? (as, 388mil / 4 = 97,000,000).
Also, would that mean if I was under this limit, the game would run no problem, but if I went over, it would start to crawl?
3) Is there an deciding piece of hardware that says if the game runs smoothly or not?
1) if someone was daft enough to program an entire game in assembly, they wouldn't need a tutorial on how to load files in ASM, because if they did, they wouldn't be programming the entire game in ASM. That would be very very difficult anyway. But the file formats for the models are available online, so they would just get what they need from that and code the file loader. There would be a noticable increase in speed compared to a game programmed in straight C - if the person could optimize everything. They could also, and probably would, suck and the game would run slower, because of the difficulties in programming something of that magnitude in ASM. It's better to just do important functions in ASM. Use a profiler.
2) no. no. The CPU has to do computations involving trig and such to rotate a square. It couldn't keep up with that. The graphics card is capable of displaying that many verticies a second...screens are updated 60 times a second or so (depending on frame rate)...which gives you considerably fewer verticies with which to work...and they're not all going to be rotating and stuff. As you increase the load on the processor, the game will start to run slower or be choppy. There is no "magic point."
3) No. The RAM, Hard drive, video card, processor, and chipset are all very important.
Thanks for the response!