The book is now out of print, and hard to come by. Last time I checked, it was going for over $200 on ebay.
Black Book of Graphics Programming, Special Edition (1997)
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Re: Black Book of Graphics Programming, Special Edition (1997)
#12You 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.
Abrash had[0] a way of explaining things that just clicked with me. His Zen of code optimization book really taught me how to think about refining my code. And where to stop refining when enough was enough.
[0] I know he's still around. Just haven't read anything by him in forever it seems.
Re: Black Book of Graphics Programming, Special Edition (1997)
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
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: http://www.pbrt.org/ 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.wordpr…
For a gentle intro to Ray tracing that is specifically geared for beginners, and lays a simple foundation for physically based rendering, I'll recommend Pete Shirley's mini-book Ray Tracing in One Weekend. http://in1weekend.blogspot.com/2016/01/ray-tracing-in-one-we...
Re: Black Book of Graphics Programming, Special Edition (1997)
#14You 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.
Abrash had[0] a way of explaining things that just clicked with me. His Zen of code optimization book really taught me how to think about refining my code. And where to stop refining when enough was enough. [0] I know he's still around. Just haven't read anything by him in forever it seems.
He had a blog at Valve http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/abrash/
And, now occasionally writes in his blog at Oculus https://www.oculus.com/blog/vrs-grand-challenge-michael-abra...
Re: Black Book of Graphics Programming, Special Edition (1997)
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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: http://www.pbrt.org/ 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.wordpr…
What would you recommend as prerequisites for PBR?
Re: Black Book of Graphics Programming, Special Edition (1997)
#16The book is now out of print, and hard to come by. Last time I checked, it was going for over $200 on ebay.
This comment is verbatim from the github page. Am I missing something?
Re: Black Book of Graphics Programming, Special Edition (1997)
#17Its 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.)
Michael Abrash (author of the Black Book) is currently doing VR on GPUs. He's been talking recently about how the GPUs need at least 10x more power, so in some sense he's not impressed by hardware accelerated graphics either. But I'll bet a dollar right now that he won't settle for a Celeron. ;) It doesn't sound like you're doing much that's 3d or graphically demanding? Not surprising you don't need a GPU.
My laptop has a GPU, and also has separate dedicated video decode hardware, so doesn't need either GPU or CPU for most video -- far easier on the battery and doesn't hog the CPU.
Aside from games, you might be interested in a GPU for CNNs or mining virtual currencies. There's no question about the effectiveness over laptop CPUs.
Re: Black Book of Graphics Programming, Special Edition (1997)
#18Its 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.)
Have you seen WebRender? It sports impressive performance, which does help on real-world applications/sites, especially on low-end HW. While its performance gains probably come from multiple sources, pushing work to GPU is afaik one of the main ones.
https://github.com/servo/webrender/wiki
Also, I'm reminded of Anandtech review of the 1st-gen rMBP:
At 2880 x 1800 most interactions are smooth but things like zooming windows or scrolling on certain web pages is clearly sub-30fps. At the higher scaled resolutions, since the GPU has to render as much as 9.2MP, even UI performance can be sluggish [...] But there are other limitations: many elements of screen drawing are still done on the CPU, and as largely serial architectures their ability to scale performance with dramatically higher resolutions is limited.
Some elements of drawing in Safari for example aren’t handled by the GPU. Quickly scrolling up and down on the AnandTech home page will peg one of the four IVB cores in the rMBP at 100%
The GPU has an easy time with its part of the process but the CPU’s workload is borderline too much for a single core to handle. Throw a more complex website at it and things get bad quickly. Facebook combines a lot of compressed images with text - every single image is decompressed on the CPU before being handed off to the GPU. Combine that with other elements that are processed on the CPU and you get a recipe for choppy scrolling.
To quantify exactly what I was seeing I measured frame rate while scrolling as quickly as possible through my Facebook news feed in Safari on the rMBP as well as my 2011 15-inch High Res MacBook Pro. While last year’s MBP delivered anywhere from 46 - 60 fps during this test, the rMBP hovered around 20 fps (18 - 24 fps was the typical range).
The good news is Mountain Lion provides some relief. At WWDC Apple mentioned the next version of Safari is ridiculously fast, but it wasn’t specific about why. It turns out that Safari leverages Core Animation in Mountain Lion and more GPU accelerated as a result. Facebook is still a challenge because of the mixture of CPU decoded images and a standard web page, but the experience is a bit better. Repeating the same test as above I measured anywhere from 20 - 30 fps while scrolling through Facebook on ML’s Safari
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6023/the-nextgen-macbook-pro-w...
I think that demonstrates clearly how GPUs are essential for todays rich UIs, especially when targeting higher resolutions. Yes, the examples here are for web, but I don't see any reason why the situation wouldn't be the same for any other stack.
Re: Black Book of Graphics Programming, Special Edition (1997)
#19You 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.
Yup you can say that again, u found my old copy and started going over it and it's truly timeless.