Ekstatische Lyriken Pinnwand

RAM vs. Time

written by Pj on Thursday June 27th, 2013 -- 8:26 a.m.

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Way back in the 90s when I got my first "modern" PC, it was a 486 DX-2, a 50 MHz processor, with 4 MB of RAM.

That 4 MB of RAM just barely allowed it to run DOOM.  I had to unload some unnecessary device drivers, which meant rebooting the computer to apply a different config.sys and autoexec.bat, but it would run it. 

In the last few days I've been working on adding lighting/shading to Multiplayer Map Editor...

At one point, I was thinking about some memory structures I could implement to calculate shading faster, but it seemed they would require a lot of memory.  So I did some math and found they would require 4 MB of RAM for this one relatively small aspect of the game.  I thought to myself "Why, that's nothing at all!"

Interesting how times have changed.  Back then we couldn't waste 4 MB if we wanted to.  Now it's hardly worth the time it takes to think about it.  Many single textures in the game consume 4 MB of video RAM.  That some part of the code requires 4 MB to speed up some calculations is relatively inconsequential.

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