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by msk-lywenn
1593 days ago
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1ms in a frame that lasts 16ms is already huge in gamedev. We often optimize processes so that they last less than that. I will always prefer 1ms in rendering, physics or audio over memory management. And the fact that it's not 1ms every frame makes things worse, because it might make miss a frame irregularly which will make the framerate jittery and the game feel very unpleasant. |
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I play a lot of games, from PC to console to mobile to handheld to VR, I really don't get these kinds of takes. Until games from indie to AAA fix their existing loading and stuttering and microstuttering and various other issues, clutching pearls over GC non-determinism seems so silly. There's no GC to blame for why you can stare at a static scene with a can in a console AAA game under development for 6 years in a mature engine and see its shadow flicker on and off. I find it hard to believe we'd be in a much worse situation if GC languages were even more prevalent. Part of this is that there's already a lot of sources for non-determinism in a C++ engine that can cause issues including frame slowdowns. Of course with effort you can eliminate or bound a lot of it, though the same is true for GC'd languages. Real-time GCs have been a thing for decades but sure you probably aren't using one, nevertheless you can often tweak a non-real-time GC in useful ways if you need to -- or as is mentioned every time this topic comes up, do the same thing you'd do in C++ by allocating big pools ahead of time and reusing things (i.e. not making garbage). Memory management is not the hard part of making a game, though the more complex and demanding the game or constraining the hardware the more you'll need to consider it regardless of language, and change up what's idiomatic when programming in that language.
Not that it matters, because any positive t is going to mysteriously always be too much, but the 1ms number is really underselling ZGC. Maximum of 1ms pause times was the goal, in practice they saw a max of around 0.5ms, an average of 0.05ms (50us), and p99 in the above-linked article of 0.1ms (100us). A more interesting complaint would be the amount of memory overhead it needs. Tradeoffs are everywhere.