this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2023
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The main target of the Godot Engine are game developers. But Godot's easy workflow and functional UI elements, makes it also a good fit for non-game applications. There are already some out there you may know, like Pixelorama, an Open Source 2D sprite editor.

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[–] o11c@programming.dev 12 points 1 year ago (8 children)

There's tends to be one major difference between games and non-game applications, so toolkits designed for one are often quite unsuitable for the other.

A game generally performs logic to paint the whole window, every frame, with at most some framerate-limiting in "paused" states. This burns power but is steady and often tries hard to reduce latency.

An application generally tries to paint as little of the window as possible, as rarely as possible. Reducing video bandwidth means using a lot less power, but can involve variable loads so sometimes latency gets pushed down to "it would be nice".

Notably, the implications of the 4-way choice between {tearing, vsync, double-buffer, triple-buffer} looks very different between those two - and so does the question of "how do we use the GPU"?

[–] crittecol@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Does this mean you're against using Godot for apps?

Personally, I feel like the extra load to reduce latency is worth it, but I honestly don't know how different the load is or how much it could be optimized. But really snappy reactive software, even when long-running processes are going, feel much better to use. I'm getting tired of using web apps for everything.

As far as what does the GPU do, right now if we're talking like b2b stuff you could do a lot more local number crunching or do really rich graphs with compute shaders etc. In the future, maybe the CPU handles most of the app and the GPU handles an AI workload in the background?

[–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Most UI frameworks are already graphically accelerated. But as stated above do the absolute minimum when updating the screen.

You don't need to redraw a static label 60 times a second.

They have totally different use cases and are written very differently.

Games use as many resources as they can to get maximum performance for rendering. This is not desirable in an application.

[–] crittecol@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mentioned above but Godot has a low processor mode that gives you some control over the refresh cycle when nothing is happening. I doubt this completely alleviates the problem but I think it's worth profiling it for individual use cases.

[–] Lmaydev@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

It's still the same essential issue. You only want to draw what has changed and only when it has changed.

Lowering the rate could make things look worse when they actually do update and cause unneeded redraws when they don't.

I get not wanting to learn something else. But it's a case of using the right tool for the job imo.

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