Comments on: “Video Game Optimization” – a good book

By: wrice127

wrice127 — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 18:17:31 +0000

The book didn’t consider console games, xbox360 and ps3; although it had one chapter “console” it wasn’t detail enough.

By: morgan3d

morgan3d — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 01:16:51 +0000

Regarding the rsqt instruction, a year ago I profiled various “fast” rsqrt methods (in C) on Intel Core2 under MSVC9 and found the following, for processing a single float32:

Lomont’s sqrt -> 0.48 ns
sqrtf(x) -> 3.77 ns

powf(x, -0.5f) -> 45.54 ns
Walsh’s* rsqrt -> 5.45 ns
Lomont’s rsqrt -> 5.44 ns
1.0 / sqrtf(x) -> 3.49 ns

All had vanishingly small error for 10^8 randomly selected values on [0, 3], except for Lomont’s sqrt approximation, which had a huge RMS error of 0.34. So I confirm that this is a case where the compiler “just does the right thing”, except that it doesn’t recognize that powf(x, -0.5) is rsqrt.

* this is the thing often attributed to Carmack

By: [책]Video Game Optimization | aronze

[책]Video Game Optimization | aronze — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 11:19:13 +0000

[...] 원문 [...]

By: Real-time Rendering Reviews “Video Game Optimization” – CoderHump.com

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:18:53 +0000

[...] can read the rest of the review here or even (if you wanted to) buy your own copy of Video Game Optimization from [...]

By: bengarney

bengarney — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:48:35 +0000

Awesome, thanks for the review! This is one of my go-to blogs for graphics programming so it’s a huge thrill to be mentioned.

Echoing Eric’s comments – it’s great to hear the book is useful even for experienced developers!

By: Wussie

Wussie — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 21:44:29 +0000

I have read this book as well and have to say that I agree with pretty much everything said here.
It’s a definite recommendation, even if you’re not specifically interested in actively squeezing every last bit of performance out of your game, it provides a very valuable insight into the techniques you’ll want to master and issues that might arise when you eventually run into performance problems.

By: EricPreisz

EricPreisz — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 21:28:39 +0000

Thanks for the review and the notes. We are glad you found it a useful read!