[MUD-Dev] The Lag monster...

[Sean Kelly]

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004, Justin Randall wrote:
> "Sean Kelly" <sean at f4.ca> wrote:

>> I'm quite interested in seeing how the new crop of PCI Express
>> graphics cards is used for server-side processing.  I would like
>> to believe that massively parallel floating point computations
>> could be useful for pathfinding, physics, and possibly other
>> simulation work on the server, but I don't have the experience to
>> back up that speculation.

> Offloading *authoritative* server calculations to one or more
> clients only leads to new avenues of grief. Rule #1 in online
> gaming: NEVER trust the client, even if other clients are
> watching.

Just to be clear, I wasn't suggesting offloading anything to the
client, this would all be done server-side.  The really cool thing
about PCI Express is that (unlike AGP) you can get data out of video
memory just as quickly as you can put it in, so for machines that
aren't using their videocard for scene display (ie. servers),
there's the potential to use the videocard for high-end number
crunching.  I know for a fact that certain render farms are
extremely excited about PCI Express for this exact reason, and I
wouldn't be surprised if the crypto community were similarly excited
(or worried).  What I don't know offhand is how much of the work
done by a typical game server these days could be sped up through
this sort of parallelization, though game physics seem like a good
candidate.

Sean
_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev