What tools are you currently using to makes games with these days? - 2013

[phibermon]

You took my grilling very well I appreciate it and you make some excellent points, time will tell on how tablets move and it's quite feasible that we'll carry around a a computer 'brick' that contains all our data, can be docked etc

but I think it's probably more likely that mobile devices will not push for ultimate power and we'll see mainframe computing make a comeback, that is to say the clouds compute and storage resources would be our system and our computers, tablets etc will simply be dumb terminals/thin clients/cloud nodes (whatever the terminology is nowadays)

Which I think would be a great shame.

I think what I'm defending more than the desktop PC is high end CPU/GPUs, which tablets and mobiles don't come close to.

Please note that a Quad core Arm clocking at 2ghz is absolutely no-where near even a single core pentium 4 from years ago, the clock speed and number of cores is not a useful way to compare two processors, the pipelining of the machine code, the branch prediction, out of order execution, cache size etc these are all really important factors in a CPU, as well as the instruction set. ARM is overly simplified compared to 8086 derived hardware, it doesn't have the amount of instructions an 86 has, not to mention other extensions such as MMX, 3Dnow, SSE/2/3 etc on modern incarnations of that architecture.

Where an operation might be a single instruction on a 86 chip, it might be 4 to 8 instructions on the simplified ARM to produce the same results, so even if it was as fast in every other respect, it's doing lots more work than an 86. The low number of transistors and low power usage come at a price. I mean Intel still can't compete with ARM and that's because they've got to pack a lot more transistors in to support the full 86 instruction set, it's actually their Achilles heel in that respect.

Ironically Intel's abilities are far more advanced than ARM (and it's licensees) and if 86 was as simple as Arm, Intel would *easily* have the lowest power usage and highest performing chips given they are a whole generation ahead of everybody else in terms of fabrication processes.

Same goes for mobile GPUs, there's some pretty good stuff going on, but even the most powerful high end PowerVR (I used to have a powervr with a special version of Turok : dinosaur hunter.. Classic!) derived GLES chips, don't even come close the performance of a Voodoo 3 or a TNT 2 (ok, maybe a little quicker but no more than a Geforce 3)

Sorry gone off topic again.

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Object pascal, I code in that, I'll use whatever compiler that allows me to support the maximum number of environments and that's currently FPC.

To play devils advocate, if I had lots of money to burn I would buy the latest Delphi in order to use FastMM and get a bit more performance on Windows platforms. it's true that at as of a couple of years ago, 32bit delphi binaries were faster and smaller than FPC binaries, but nowadays? I don't think anybody has done an extensive comparison for a while.

Anyway, if Object Pascal was used extensivly in the gaming industry they'd probably all use Delphi, companies like having support and accountability for things they rely upon for their investments and if that were the situation then Delphi would be very different and their compiler would be a lot more like FPC