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This application optimization stuff is all wrong.

VIAN

Diamond Member
There are three things. The API. The driver. The game.

It's very simple - An API is released - the only application a driver should be optimized for is the API and nothing else. And a game should be optimized only for the API and nothing else. I don't understand all this... Graphics card companies and Developers are messing with the reason the API was invented in the first place and this is stupid.
 
In a perfect world yes. Ideally the API abstraction layer would insulate the driver and application from one another, but that doesn't always happen in the real world.

Edit: At least the way things are now, the application and driver programmers can program for a known interface, the API. It used to be that the application programmer was responsible for writing directly to the hardware.

Ah, those were the days. Run the setup program for some DOS game and try to remember which IRQ and DMA settings you had your GUS set for, only to find that GUS support was broken and you had to install the SB16 emulator software which you didn't have room to run high so you had to run it low and then you didn't have enough memory to run the game.
 
Originally posted by: BoberFett
In a perfect world yes. Ideally the API abstraction layer would insulate the driver and application from one another, but that doesn't always happen in the real world.

Edit: At least the way things are now, the application and driver programmers can program for a known interface, the API. It used to be that the application programmer was responsible for writing directly to the hardware.

Ah, those were the days. Run the setup program for some DOS game and try to remember which IRQ and DMA settings you had your GUS set for, only to find that GUS support was broken and you had to install the SB16 emulator software which you didn't have room to run high so you had to run it low and then you didn't have enough memory to run the game.

DOS is dead and it's never coming back. Long live Windows!
 
Yeah... you can... manually configure individual bootdisks for all your applications because of its 640K limits and poor extended memory management? Juggle soundcard IRQs because of its crappy hardware management? Run out of space because it doesn't support large hard drives or even FAT32? Yes, all this and more can be yours with DOS!

DOS 6 was a lot better and more stable than Windows 3.1 (which was basically a flaky graphical shell on top of DOS6). But MS has come a long way since then.
 
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