Re: [Caml-list] OpenGL

[Jon Harrop <jdh30@cam.ac.uk>]

On Sunday 11 April 2004 7:20 am, Brian Hurt wrote:
> ...
> second, or 1 frame every 16.6ms, a 20ms pause to garbage collect is bad.
> This is soft realtime, but it's still realtime programming.  And I have
> reliable reports of people seeing 500ms pauses in Java programs.
>
> Wether this would be a problem for Ocaml or not I can't speak to.

Well, I'm writing real-time graphical programs in ocaml and, so far, I haven't 
had any problems with the GC. At one point I thought I had a serious problem 
with it, but it turned out that increasing the number of vertices in a 
display list over an unknown (to me, at least) theshold was resulting in a 4 
orders of magnitude drop in performance in the GL, nothing to do with ocaml 
or its GC.

> ...
> Notice how I phrased my response.  Especially since currently the vast 
> majority of heavy computation is done on the graphics card, I'd expect the 
> overhead of the API to be lost in the noise.

Although the "vast majority of heavy computation" may be done on the graphics 
card, don't forget that the relatively easy computations done on the vastly 
slower CPU in serial are just as responsible for the overall speed.

Cheers,
Jon.

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