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Quake's Lighting Model: Surface Caching (1996)

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Re: Quake's Lighting Model: Surface Caching (1996)

#21

Post by kijiki »

spitfire wrote: post #11
vanderZwan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand it's great but has a lot of information that is outdated and downright counterproductive on today's hardware. I kinda wish people would take old gems like this and bring out an annotated version that adds updated information.

The technical knowledge in it is both out of date, and more relevant than ever. The particular details are long since irrelevant - even in 1996 optimizing for the 8086 was irrelevant. But the thought process, approach and lessons learnt from optimizing the 8086 are still relevant today. In fact, they're probably more easily demonstrated through and example using the 8086 than in modern environments. I still use Abras…

Paradise, not S3.

Re: Quake's Lighting Model: Surface Caching (1996)

#22

Post by dr_zoidberg »

spitfire wrote: post #11
vanderZwan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand it's great but has a lot of information that is outdated and downright counterproductive on today's hardware. I kinda wish people would take old gems like this and bring out an annotated version that adds updated information.

The technical knowledge in it is both out of date, and more relevant than ever. The particular details are long since irrelevant - even in 1996 optimizing for the 8086 was irrelevant. But the thought process, approach and lessons learnt from optimizing the 8086 are still relevant today. In fact, they're probably more easily demonstrated through and example using the 8086 than in modern environments. I still use Abras…

For more up to date technical knowledge, I really liked his software 3d renderer articles. He talks about Pentium 4s and such, which are old of course, but he gives good tips on optimizing for a cache hungry, superscalar processor (which is pretty much relevant today).

Re: Quake's Lighting Model: Surface Caching (1996)

#23

Post by jurjenh »

Retra wrote: post #17
paloaltokid wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always like to think about the fact that they went to the moon in the 1960s. We're all a bunch of babies compared to what they pulled off then. "The on-board Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was about 1 cubic foot with 2K of 16-bit RAM and 36K of hard-wired core-rope memory with copper wires threaded or not threaded through tiny magnetic cores. The 16-bit words were generally 14 bits of data (or two op-codes), 1 sign…

"Oh gee, people were so much more talented when they had to build a chair by hand rather than run a whole factory of chair building machines. If only those modern programmers working on LCH/ATLAS had the chops to compute some moon landing trajectories."

I would say on the whole, yes - that is actually true. Now you only need one "smart" person to program up the machinery, whereas in the past you did need multiple skilled craftsmen in a variety of roles - not exactly apples vs apples, but I think that one of the unfortunate side effects of too much specialization is a lack of a broad knowledge base that lets you apply skills from one field in a different area.

Re: Quake's Lighting Model: Surface Caching (1996)

#24

Post by [deleted] »

Retra wrote: post #17
paloaltokid wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always like to think about the fact that they went to the moon in the 1960s. We're all a bunch of babies compared to what they pulled off then. "The on-board Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was about 1 cubic foot with 2K of 16-bit RAM and 36K of hard-wired core-rope memory with copper wires threaded or not threaded through tiny magnetic cores. The 16-bit words were generally 14 bits of data (or two op-codes), 1 sign…

"Oh gee, people were so much more talented when they had to build a chair by hand rather than run a whole factory of chair building machines. If only those modern programmers working on LCH/ATLAS had the chops to compute some moon landing trajectories."

[deleted]

Re: Quake's Lighting Model: Surface Caching (1996)

#26

Post by angersock »

thraveboy wrote: post #8
thraveboy wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking for a pdf now too. Here's what I've found so far: https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/texture/texture.nocolor...

Here's my original Stanford page with info on it, I'm surprised it's still up. lol :) http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/~rsg/siggraph94/index.html

Galerkin....like, finite element analysis Galerkin?

Re: Quake's Lighting Model: Surface Caching (1996)

#27

Post by thraveboy »

angersock wrote: post #26
thraveboy wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my original Stanford page with info on it, I'm surprised it's still up. lol :) http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/~rsg/siggraph94/index.html

Galerkin....like, finite element analysis Galerkin?

Yep. For the radiosity based global illumination things, it's the most common way of framing and solving the way light energy is passed through an environment. And most of the work is in minimizing the computationally expensive visibility operations (shadows, etc) by determining how much light energy is going to pass between two surfaces (based on distance, size, orientation, visibility, etc), and then computing using the fewest rays and the right level of resolution of the energy to efficiently utilize compute resources. Basically... :)

Re: Quake's Lighting Model: Surface Caching (1996)

#28

Post by emcrazyone »

spitfire wrote: post #11
vanderZwan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand it's great but has a lot of information that is outdated and downright counterproductive on today's hardware. I kinda wish people would take old gems like this and bring out an annotated version that adds updated information.

The technical knowledge in it is both out of date, and more relevant than ever. The particular details are long since irrelevant - even in 1996 optimizing for the 8086 was irrelevant. But the thought process, approach and lessons learnt from optimizing the 8086 are still relevant today. In fact, they're probably more easily demonstrated through and example using the 8086 than in modern environments. I still use Abras…

agreed, excellent point I wish more people would take note of or recognize.

Re: Quake's Lighting Model: Surface Caching (1996)

#29

Post by voltagex_ »

vanderZwan wrote: post #10
spitfire wrote: post #5

This was Chapter 68 (!) in Michael Abrash's very excellent Black book of graphics programming. I still have my copy, and it's still relevant today.

From what I understand it's great but has a lot of information that is outdated and downright counterproductive on today's hardware. I kinda wish people would take old gems like this and bring out an annotated version that adds updated information.

I feel the same way about "Peter Norton's Guide to Assembly for the IBM PC". I once contacted Penguin(?) about getting some rights to annotate it but I was scared away by the forms I was sent to sign.
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