Faster than we think...

[Philip Swartzleonard]

Philip Swartzleonard || Fri 15 Feb 2002 09:17:30p:

> Well, it certainly is used for applications, although i can't think
> of any off the top of my head. Games too, see pygame for that. I'm
> actually working on a 3d roguelike completely in python, and it's
> only a little bit slow (and thats only because in my current setup
> every frame drawn involves either 1200 or 1600 function calls, i can
> do better =). (There are some screenshots at
> rubydragon.com/image/sproj -- not very good looking yet though :).

Just a little update on this. I just got a GEforce4 based card, which
is capable of doing hardware accelerated graphics in a window, and now
my program is is running perfectly and with no per-frame lag
whatsoever--it's at least 30fps as far as i can tell (and i have some
experience with this :)

So we have those 1200 or 1600 function calls per frame causing NO
IMPACT... it does it ALL thirty plus times a second. Interpreted,
clunky, unoptimized, heavily function dependent code running at
apparently 48000 or so function calls per second without a problem.
And fast.

I'm sure the card isn't optimizing my function calls out of the code
... and i thought they were the slowest thing in the show.

Now i have a different problem, which i had back before i started with
textures and things got complicated. Apparently the WX input queue
freezes after i receive forty or so messages in a very short span...
Weird.

Anyway, the point is... well, had i tried a hardware accelerated
version of this sooner, i would probably have seen it... but it seems
that less and less is fit these days for being written in a lower
level language than python =)