01-05-2018, 02:57 PM
Regarding Intel “Meltdown” issue.
Unless you haven’t been following the news lately, you might have heard of “Meltdown”. For those that haven’t, Meltdown is a security flaw in Intel and some ARM CPU’s Speculative Execution systems.
Operating Systems will be patched over the next few weeks and months for this security flaw. For most consumers there will be very little performance impact. This is true for most video games. However, GearCity is not like most video games.
GearCity handles an extreme amount of data compared to most games. For the in-game reports, we write a few hundred 10-30KB files to the file system every turn. The save game and internal game data is written in SQLITE. Both file system IO and SQL performance will most likely degrade on every Intel CPU. How it will impact GearCity remains to be seen. I will do benchmarking on my Mac once I receive the updates. And mitigate any performance issues if I am able. Please note, our concern with Meltdown is not security related. We are concerned with performance loss due to Operating Systems fixing the security issues.
For the handful of AMD users, the “Meltdown” patches for Windows and Linux currently do not effect you. You still have security issues with “Spectre”, but that has little impact on GearCity.
And for the ethical interest of full disclosure. I hold significant interest in AMD and I am long on the stock. This post is preemptive information about possible performance concerns for the majority of our customers. I will report back after testing to confirm if the game has been effected in any significant way or not.
Unless you haven’t been following the news lately, you might have heard of “Meltdown”. For those that haven’t, Meltdown is a security flaw in Intel and some ARM CPU’s Speculative Execution systems.
Operating Systems will be patched over the next few weeks and months for this security flaw. For most consumers there will be very little performance impact. This is true for most video games. However, GearCity is not like most video games.
GearCity handles an extreme amount of data compared to most games. For the in-game reports, we write a few hundred 10-30KB files to the file system every turn. The save game and internal game data is written in SQLITE. Both file system IO and SQL performance will most likely degrade on every Intel CPU. How it will impact GearCity remains to be seen. I will do benchmarking on my Mac once I receive the updates. And mitigate any performance issues if I am able. Please note, our concern with Meltdown is not security related. We are concerned with performance loss due to Operating Systems fixing the security issues.
For the handful of AMD users, the “Meltdown” patches for Windows and Linux currently do not effect you. You still have security issues with “Spectre”, but that has little impact on GearCity.
And for the ethical interest of full disclosure. I hold significant interest in AMD and I am long on the stock. This post is preemptive information about possible performance concerns for the majority of our customers. I will report back after testing to confirm if the game has been effected in any significant way or not.
"great writers are indecent people, they live unfairly, saving the best part for paper.
good human beings save the world, so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal.
if you read this after I am dead it means I made it." ― Charles Bukowski
good human beings save the world, so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal.
if you read this after I am dead it means I made it." ― Charles Bukowski