CompuServe Messages

Don't worry, Microsoft will find a way to eat those cycles and those spare memory chips. 🙂 As much as I'd hate to quote him, because he's a goof in so many other ways, but one of Pournelle's Laws is "one person, at least one CPU." And in this case, a rendering task is a "person." You'll need extra memory for 3DS and the rendering task and WinNT's many processes, on top of what you want for the person who's using the machine. It's a tough fit. And if WinNT's preemptive multitasking is done the least bit sensibly, and although I haven't studied the details of it, it appears to be done well, then there are no "extra" cycles. Many background tasks are in a "wait" state: waiting for something to happen, an interrupt, a mouse event, some other event. They don't "busy-wait" or consume many cycles. The multitasking manager gives control to each task based on priorities, and among processes of equal weight, many might be doing nothing, and will surrender their time slice. This is a simplified view, but it shows that your foreground task might actually eat more than 1/(N processes) cycles, so there may be no "spare" cycles that can be eaten without noticeable degradation in the user's programs. To put it another way, the user gets very tuned to the time that operations are "supposed" to take. If they take longer, they'll be visiting your office shortly. 🙂