Not many developers have the insights of Michael Abrash. He is a game developer with decades of experience building commercial games, including a game you may recognize as "Quake". His Graphics Programming Black Book is years old, but much of it is just as interesting as it was at the time of writing. And, the entire book is available online, for free.
The book consists of 70 chapters on optimization, graphics, and assembly programming. The entire book is insightful and interesting, but my favorite chapters are these:
- The Best Optimizer Is between Your Ears
- There Ain’t No Such Thing as the Fastest Code
- Optimizing for 286 and 386, 486 (continued), and Pentium (continued here and here).
- Algorithms for fast drawing of lines, anti-aliased lines, polygons, fast convex polygons, and 3d objects (continued)
- Quake’s visible-surface determination, 3D clipping, hidden-surface removal, span sorting, lighting, surface caching and post-mortem.
Enjoy! Again, the entire book is accessible here: Graphics Programming Black Book.
Tags: Algorithms
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[…] Program like a Quake developer; A free book by Michael Abrash, one of the developers of Quake. The book is quite outdated, of course, but it’s still a very interesting read. […]