this is because (unlike a traditional BSP), my approach doesn't "choose" the plane, it calculates it.
basically, all you really need is an averaged center-point, and a vector describing how the "mass" is distributed relative to the point.
Ah, I see, that sort of calculation should be relatively cheap to what I was imagining. Thanks for explaining.
this is part of why/how it is "quick and dirty"...
even then, it isn't usually as much of an issue at present, as memory bandwidth has increased considerably over the past several years (relative to CPU speed increases), making the limit harder to run into (currently typically only really happens during bulk memory-copies and similar AFAICT, rather than in general-purpose code).
it was much worse of a problem 10 years ago though.
This is good to know. A lot of what I know about game programming is, unfortunately, dated to roughly 10 years ago. It doesn't help that I was reading a bunch of articles from Intel recently to catch up, who may be blowing the bandwidth issue out of proportion (I don't know, just a guess).
yeah.
granted, it probably depends a lot on the code.
but, 10 years ago, it was fairly common to hit the limit if things didn't all fit in cache, in general, such as when working with arrays, ...
now it generally requires doing lots of SIMD operations or similar, or running all cores at high load, ..., since normal scalar code doesn't usually run fast enough.
basically, while CPU clock speeds have increased by a factor of around 2-3, memory speeds have increased by a factor of around 8-10.
granted, it is a little worse off if one considers it per-core, or includes lots or multithreaded SIMD-based code, which can also hit the limit, but multithreaded SIMD-heavy code is still a relative minority of the code in use, and at least from the POV of "generic" single-threaded scalar code, things have gotten better...
granted, Intel tends to assume a lot more agressive use of SIMD than often seen in practice, where at least AFAICT, most of us (?) are mostly using SIMD as a nifty feature to speed up 3D vector math, rather than writing piles of highly vectorized code (probably because vectorization is generally a huge PITA...).
granted, in any case per-scale it is worse than 20 years ago (where the CPU speeds and RAM speeds were much closer).