[cottonvibes]

Originally Posted by runawayprisoner

Really now? Because coordinates are stored in floating point precision values, or better yet, double floating point precision values. Only the graphics card can determine where the particles are in the space. Up to 1000 particles with each coordinates stored as floating point precision values, and their other parameters to identify them as particle objects in the game, as well as their lighting coordinates and a whole slew of other values ought to take up at least 1MB each. That's almost 1GB for 1000 particles.

i doubt 1 particle will end up taking 1MB, infact all 1000 particles won't even take up 1MB.

On traditional 32-bit systems, Double Precision values take up 8 bytes (32bits).

if you store X,Y,Z coordinates as Doubles, then you'll only be using 24 bytes (192bits)

then we can also add Lighting info (not sure if lighting would be applicable, since we were only talking about transforming their location with physics, but i'll include it anyways)

anyways, i'll consider lighting and various other information about the particles as being an extra 4 doubles.

so, so far we have 7 doubles of information per each particle.

that adds up to 56 bytes (448 bits).


so if we have 1000 particles each storing 7 doubles of information (7doubles = 56bytes = 448bits), we end up with 56,000 bytes worth of data.

and all that only equates to 54.6875 kB! (1kB = 1024bytes)
not even close to 1GB, and not even 1mB, and thats for all 1000 particles!




anyways, i guess to get back on topic, 8-cores for the average user might be over-kill.
but i'm sure people will find ways to utilize the extra cores.

maybe just run folding@home if you really can't find a use for them...