Articles Section

This section contains some of my more in depth research.

• Particle System Memory Allocation
• DVD Benchmarks

Particle System Memory Allocation

Date of Original: March 21, 2004
Last Updated: March 29, 2004

I did some research into memory allocation methods for a particle system. A lot of people believe that a list of pointers is better than a list of objects, and some believe the opposite. Others use a static array. I decided to research into the different methods, using a particle system as the situtation.

Updated March 29 with a lot more results, refactored code, and two new algorithms, VectorAlgor and FlatArray.

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DVD Benchmarks

Date of Original: July 13, 2005

I recently benchmarked my DVD drives with the Nero speed testing tool, and noticed that you can save results as HTML, so just for fun I am putting them up.

Results for NEC ND-3500A

Results for ASUS DVD-E616P2 (also tried with firmware 1.08 with similar results)

Test Setup:

• Asus A8N-SLI (nForce4)
• AMD Athlon 64 3200+
• Windows XP
• DVD used was a DVD+R of Fedora Core 4 x86-64 ISO
• Both drives were set up as master, and were both using UDMA mode 2 (33MB/s)
• The Asus drive was using 80 conductor cable, and the NEC 40 conductor. But as both use UDMA 2, it should not matter.

Conclusion:

Despite both of them claiming to be 16X DVD drives, the NEC is a much better and faster drive. The Asus drive advertises to be quiet, but I find both are nearly silent.

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