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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

> Also, doing games development in C# doesn't make sense to me ...

Why not? Not everyone is doing the next Crysis.

> I mean, if you value productivity over runtime efficiency and want something that runs on top of a VM, might as well get something out of it, like portability.

Why don't people learn about compiler design? languages != implementation

Are you aware that Mono also compiles to native code or that .NET on Windows Phone 8 is also compiled to native code?

Having said that, given the prevalence of Windows on the games industry, many studios have migrated their C++/MFC tooling to C#/Windows Forms/WPF, even AAA studios.

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Compiling to native code != Performance. Haskell compiles to native code too (ghc)....

Good Graphics and Physics, where required needs performance. As the hardware is improving day by day, our demands are increasing two folds. Just think about the performance we would need, to render the real world as is !!!

We are going towards virtual reality. We need something with very fast optimised runtime.

Some games does not require cutting edge Graphics. Use anything there....

Funny that you say that, I am old enough to have discussed the same issue about Forth vs Assembly, C vs Assembly, C vs C++ and many others language performance issues.

Fact is that eventually the optimizers for the given compiler get good enough for the task at hand and people move on.

Most intensive graphics and physics are already being done on the GPU anyway and there are quite a few ways to target them as well.

Though, GPUs are meant for highly specialized number-crunching, they doesn't have direct access to system memory. One also gets additional latency transferring data between RAM and GPU memory.

Also, GPU is a temporary technology. Wait for some time, and see CPUs getting more GPU like.

Hmm, I always saw each of them as an answer to completely different problem, so I have hard time contemplating this scenario.

How exactly would CPU be more like GPU? What would happen to branching and out of order execution pipelines? Do you see today's complex superscalar cores so cheap and small in the future that you could have thousands of them on single die? What other way is there get vector computations to work as well as scalar computations on same hardware? Would you rather have few superscalar cores and a lot of SIMD's around it? Or do you envision a completely new architecture?

I'm just trying to get a picture of how this would be done. Any reading material would be welcome.

> Though, GPUs are meant for highly specialized number-crunching, they doesn't have direct access to system memory. One also gets additional latency transferring data between RAM and GPU memory.

Yes they do when shared memory is used, not all GPUs have dedicated memory.

Even the PS4 will have shared memory between CPU and GPU systems.

> Also, GPU is a temporary technology. Wait for some time, and see CPUs getting more GPU like.

This is Intel's wish because their GPUs suck, I don't think it will happen.

AMD is also talking about 'GPU technology' afaik.

Game devs head for it too, so that they don't have to manage a shader language.

It is inevitable. This will happen.

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