RE: [GD-Windows] More timer fun!

[Steve L. <st...@mi...>]

Anyone mind if I summarize and send this all to an internal MS alias
with a bunch on kernel gurus on it?  I'll see what I can find...

Obviously, no promises...

Cheers,
	Steve


-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Watte [mailto:hp...@mi...]=20
Sent: Monday, September 02, 2002 3:31 PM
To: Grills, Jeff; gam...@li...
Subject: RE: [GD-Windows] More timer fun!=20


> don't manifest on their development machines.  Even Tom Forsyth, whom
most
> of us would say is a reasonably intelligent programmer, had problems
with
> clock drift on non-development machines using timeGetTime().  Can
> we expect
> as much from your average run of the mill programmer?  I think not.

But now we're dealing with TIME!

There's no way for your app to tell whether QueryPerformanceCounter()
jumped forward, or whether some device driver decided to lock up the
machine for a second. There is NO DIFFERENCE at the application
programming level. Thus, these functions aren't broken (unless they
actually GO BACKWARDS, as opposed to just lagging or skipping).

Note that two computers that are not hooked up to the same physical
crystal are doomed to skew out of sync sooner or later. The description
I saw from Tom sounds to me as if there was no attempt to bring the
clocks back in sync over the network. If you don't do that, you will
lose, always. Just like a digital mixing studio (or video production
studio) Just Won't Work (tm) without a common house clock.

> MS is in the unique position to know enough about the actual hardware
to
> understand if the system has these problems with QPC, and avoid the
extra

I believe chip set vendors write drivers for their chip sets, just
like toaster vendors write drivers for their toasters. And, looking
at the varying quality of chipset drivers (and other drivers in
general), I've seen little correlation between "more compled systems"
and "more competent driver writers".

Cheers,

			/ h+



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