[Algorithms] Multithreading with Hardware Acceleration

[Chris B. <Chr...@ma...>]

I've had a thought for a while.

If I ran my main loop in a thread and the video rendering in a separate thread (with a bit of sync'ing) I could net a bit of time during hardware blocks to start preparing the next frame, maybe do a bit of extra occlusion culling\tesselation or AI. Of course I have no idea about video cards and blocking. (Like maybe on a T&L card it would just gather it's data and go off for a while doing things and not bother the CPU. If the card however keeps accessing the ram however the context switches might bite back at any gains you make)

Does anyone know if this is a worth the effort? (I'm already threading the network and file system queues so there is no learning involved)

Chris Brodie

(I apologise for the HTML. My mail department says your not getting it :) )