The code needs to be very, very fast and efficient to sort all textures, surfaces etc, factor in culling and other cpu intensive calculations.
Well that's certainly true if you had to compile Dark GDK from source. I wasn't aware that was the case though. Of course, if you *do* have to compile it all from source than you probably don't actually have a choice of compiler.
Thats a real-world game with levels. If you're going to do 1 room of graphics then sure, the CPU isn't going to be the limiting factor.
Well on the face of it, it seemed improbable that H&K had actually written a real-world game with levels, AI, etc just to compare the relative speed of two 3d engines. But if you know different..