Numsgil

Is it possible/kosher to create multiple device contexts in DirectX 11 with the purpose of using one for rendering and one for GPGPU?

 

Basically I'm working on a something sort of like a sim game.  I want a render thread running as close to 60 FPS as possible, but I also want to offload a lot of the sim calculations to DirectCompute, and run it as fast as possible.  That means the sim thread can run anywhere from 1 to 1000 FPS, depending on what's going on.  The sim also needs to push data to the render thread eventually, but I don't necessarily mind that going out through the North Bridge to the CPU and back to the GPU (I don't mind a bit of latency from the sim to the renderer, as long as things stay responsive to the user).

Are there any books or article series discussing database use in MMOs? For instance, there's a few one-off posts on various sites, but I'd be interested in a more comprehensive examination.

I've done a bit of SQL work, and my impression is that it would be a bit like a square-peg-in-a-round-hole situation trying to get the relational model to make sense for an MMO. If we take the simplified case of just inventory management, would you maintain a table of every item in the game universe, and have a field defining a UID for which container it lived in? Wouldn't that make a simple query like "what's in my inventory?" take forever? Many MMOs get around this by having a limited number of slots in your inventory, with few objects existing outside of players' inventories (or in banks) but if you wanted to really open that up and do an inventory system like the late Ultima games, or even something like Skyrim, where the player can have hundreds of unique items, and there are tens of thousands of unique items randomly placed throughout the world, I imagine things quickly get hairy. You'd probably also want a database model that lends itself to spatial queries (what items exist within a 20 meter bubble of some position in the world), which isn't something relational databases do very well.

I feel like there's enough domain-specific knowledge here that there must be a book or article series somewhere, either in getting relational databases to work well, or in some Non-SQL technology.