This is a very nice article on double buffering, and I especially love the extension to game state. I never thought of that at double buffering, but yes I’m frequently keeping “previous frame” state for a lot of different systems including physics, controllers, AI state machines, etc. They are usually ad-hoc buffering. Each system handles it’s own. This makes me wonder if it would make any sense to unify previous frame memory, what it would look like, and whether there might be advantages.
> In their hearts, computers are sequential beasts. [...even with several cores, only a few operations are running concurrently.]
My one small nitpick is that the presentation at the beginning felt very single-core CPU centric, even with the side note on threading. GPUs are both parallel processors, and they’re being used in parallel with the CPU; many games are running things like CPU physics in parallel while the GPU is doing rendering. And to really see this point, many games use triple buffering and are doing some amount of overlapped rendering of two frames at the same time, not just one.
> In their hearts, computers are sequential beasts. [...even with several cores, only a few operations are running concurrently.]
My one small nitpick is that the presentation at the beginning felt very single-core CPU centric, even with the side note on threading. GPUs are both parallel processors, and they’re being used in parallel with the CPU; many games are running things like CPU physics in parallel while the GPU is doing rendering. And to really see this point, many games use triple buffering and are doing some amount of overlapped rendering of two frames at the same time, not just one.