Black Book of Graphics Programming, Special Edition (1997)
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Re: Black Book of Graphics Programming, Special Edition (1997)
#2Its hugely dated, but I really treasured my copy (its still somewhere in the attic since I put the ebook on my iPad). From a 'how to program DOS graphics' it is nominally useless but as a holistic look at ways to get around problems that were designed in by engineers who didn't think about graphics performance it is still fun.
Re: Black Book of Graphics Programming, Special Edition (1997)
#3I wouldn't recommend it for most modern-day graphics practitioners. You're much better off reading Physically Based Rendering, and a Trip down the Graphics Pipeline (blog post series). After that, I would recommend reading and playing around with the UE4 source code (which is very approachable).
The "tricks" are nice but don't translate super well to how modern pipelines are usually architected.
Re: Black Book of Graphics Programming, Special Edition (1997)
#4Excellent book.
If nothing else, the chapter intros are definitely still relevant(informative and hilarious at the same time).
Re: Black Book of Graphics Programming, Special Edition (1997)
#5Nice to see this here, thanks for sharing it cmsimike.
This was a labor of love/appreciation for me a couple of years ago over a Christmas break. I went through a retro gamedev period during that break, read a few books like Masters of Doom, and found myself trying to read through the various (relatively poor quality) electronic copies of the Black Book that were floating around. Yak shaving being what it is, I spent most of my Christmas break scraping and cleaning up a few different copies to put this together so I could (more comfortably) read it on my Kindle.
FWIW, these conversions were done with an eye for preserving an interesting piece of gaming/graphics programming history, and aren't really intended to be relevant today.
I also converted the Zen of Assembly Language also by Abrash[1], but it's considerably less relevant than the Black Book in general.
Re: Black Book of Graphics Programming, Special Edition (1997)
#6I wouldn't recommend it for most modern-day graphics practitioners. You're much better off reading Physically Based Rendering, and a Trip down the Graphics Pipeline (blog post series). After that, I would recommend reading and playing around with the UE4 source code (which is very approachable). The "tricks" are nice but don't translate super well to how modern pipelines are usually architected.
Could you post a link, please? Searching for those terms leads to a '96 book and some different blog posts, but I am not sure if the ones you are referring to. Thanks!
Re: Black Book of Graphics Programming, Special Edition (1997)
#7I wouldn't recommend it for most modern-day graphics practitioners. You're much better off reading Physically Based Rendering, and a Trip down the Graphics Pipeline (blog post series). After that, I would recommend reading and playing around with the UE4 source code (which is very approachable). The "tricks" are nice but don't translate super well to how modern pipelines are usually architected.
Could you post a link, please? Searching for those terms leads to a '96 book and some different blog posts, but I am not sure if the ones you are referring to. Thanks!
I think he was referring to Pharr's book on PBR:
It is an absolute beast of a book, and not for beginners. Nor is it written as such; After Ch. 1 the book acts less like a sequential book, and more like an extensive reference guide for anything you'd need to really understand what goes on in a Ray Tracer.
As for "A trip down the Graphics Pipeline", I found it fairly easily:
https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through-the-...
Re: Black Book of Graphics Programming, Special Edition (1997)
#8I wouldn't recommend it for most modern-day graphics practitioners. You're much better off reading Physically Based Rendering, and a Trip down the Graphics Pipeline (blog post series). After that, I would recommend reading and playing around with the UE4 source code (which is very approachable). The "tricks" are nice but don't translate super well to how modern pipelines are usually architected.
Could you post a link, please? Searching for those terms leads to a '96 book and some different blog posts, but I am not sure if the ones you are referring to. Thanks!
Physically Based Rendering[0]
Graphics Pipeline[1]
I'd also add Real Time Rendering [2] to that list.
[0] http://www.pbrt.org/ [1] https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through-the-... [2] http://www.realtimerendering.com/book.html
Re: Black Book of Graphics Programming, Special Edition (1997)
#9You shouldn't read this book to learn modern practices. You should read it to improve your way of thinking about problems. The book is timeless if you think about it this way.
Re: Black Book of Graphics Programming, Special Edition (1997)
#10Its hugely dated, but I really treasured my copy (its still somewhere in the attic since I put the ebook on my iPad). From a 'how to program DOS graphics' it is nominally useless but as a holistic look at ways to get around problems that were designed in by engineers who didn't think about graphics performance it is still fun.
I'm still not impressed by hardware accelerated graphics for anything other than video games.
My celeron laptop with no GPU drivers (using the EFI frame buffer only) can decode full screen video in real time and run pretty much any graphical application I want (except Gnome3, but that runs poorly on my machines that have working GPUs too.)