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Comment by Kristine1975 | Hacker News Reader

Kristine1975

>plus a regular core using 4KB on other end.

The .exe is 4K (it has been compressed using Crinkler), not the application's RAM requirements. The game .kkrieger for example is a 96K .exe, but uses several hundred MB of RAM when run.

Also, the strict size requirements can interfere with execution speed. From the .nfo again:

   believe it or not, this was running at 30 fps in a gefoce 7900 at some
   point, but size optimizations forced us to ask you for a pretty decent
   graphics card, like a geforce 8800gtx or hd4850. please, make sure you
   have d3d9_33.dll somewhere there. also, you only need windows xp.

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Oh yeah, I forgot about that. I wonder what this one's runtime in RAM is. Regarding GPU quote, that's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. It's sort of a cheat where a massive amount of resources are used in one place to reduce a tiny amount in another. An impressive optimization requires little to no extra resources in B when optimizing A. There's some types that straight-up can't seem to have that tradeoff. Yet, the more constrained demo scenes were forced to figure out a bunch of them that worked.

So, I think there's potential for GPU subsets or CPU/GPU tradeoffs to make for interesting opportunities for people to show off brilliance.

>Regarding GPU quote, that's exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about. It's sort of a cheat where a massive amount of resources are used in one place to reduce a tiny amount in another.

Since the demo was originally entered in the 4K competition at the Breakpoint 2009 demo party, it had to run on the computer designated to run the competition's entries. So it's not like it could require an arbitrarily powerful GPU.

Although the compo computer was pretty beefy for the time: https://breakpoint.untergrund.net/2009/compos_pc.php

Fair enough. The spec requirements I'm mentioning would apply to people setting competition requirements more than the authors. The authors should of course work within the constraints for any particular competition. They can still try my challenge on the side.

" Intel Core2Quad at 2.66GHz, 2GB of RAM, with a NVidia GeForce 295 GTX with 2x896MB of VRAM. "

Double CPU and more GPU than what I'm writing this on but half the RAM. Beefy indeed. .exe size is still impressive and all given what they're doing.

That's the thing, though.... If this were an arbitrarily sized demo, I (and probably most people) would agree with you about the GPU stuff. But it's not arbitrarily sized, it's all in 4K. And it's from 2009.

4k + 300MB per other commenter. Lets not focus too much on one number without other.

Programming is all about finding and exploiting ways to cheat.

I remember overhearing a conversation in the Sun cafeteria about how the Aviator flight simulator only had one-half of a 3d model of the airplane, and it just reflected it to get the other half. They complained that was cheating, but that's just how it is!

Oh sure. It's one approach. We have to rate the cheats or honest work somehow. I think one way is to look at both what's produced with what type and number of resources are utilized. The constraints each provide plus what's achieved with them vs some baseline might be a good example. Baseline maybe determined after first round of submissions.

Btw, I'd probably have left off Space Invaders for exact reason you mentioned. Curious to know what you find to be most impressive demo on that system, though.

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