This might be an appropriate moment for a slight tactical withdrawal on my part. While I have extensive experience in databases, my applications experience is fairly limited. I do understand that whereas it's possible to produce a *proven* design using the old-fashioned functional approach (restricted to a single thread/core), it is not possible to do this with multi-threaded applications. Nonetheless, a commitment to quality engineering can produce tremendous benefits.
There are certainly plenty of calculation problems in flight sims. One I've given a fair degree of thought to is perception and a detailed model would probably break the field of vision down to at least three cones. Relevant factors include angle-off from center of vision, angular velocity of target vs field, surface area of target (a complex calculation that might need simplification), contrast vs background, line of sight etc. Some of these factors apply to sensor calculations also.
This kind of calculation is amenable to parallel processing and isn't always time critical. Of course it should be possible to spread the calculation load of a/c physics over several threads as well.
As it happens, I did by an i7 system recently though I did understand at the time that there weren't really any games to stretch even dual-core machines. After 7 years without buying a new PC, I found the job pretty frustrating. There's not much point on spending €850 on a good gaming PC that will choke on applications in 2 years and has limited upgrade potential. On the other hand, there's really no return for gamers in more expensive systems at the moment.
My new PC cost €1800, excluding the screen; I got i7/920, 12GB RAM, HD5870 plus a couple of extras like a TV tuner and sound card. This machine won't get out of 2nd gear for years on any standard game. On the other hand, the €400 graphics card will probably be struggling already in 2 years time. According to NVIDIA fancy PCs are a waste, but they have it backwards. Fancy graphics cards are a waste when lashings of cheap RAM and CPU power that could vastly enrich the gaming experience are available but are ignored by developers.
It looks like PC gaming is on the way out except for niches like flight sims. This is a pity because PC games allow much more interesting games than the clunky game-controllers permit.
Regards,
dduff
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01-24-2010, 12:08 PM
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