Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash (2001)
71–80 of 85 posts
Re: Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash (2001)
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
>that load times today are no better than back then, and are often times much worse. Uhhhh, well I don't tend to wait 3-5 minutes for a single .jpeg to load on a website any more. I can stream a hq video in real time over the internet, whereas downloading a single 30MB realmedia video so pixelated you could barely see what was on the screen would take an hour or more to download. A 3MB mp3 would take 5-10 minutes. Th…
Uhhhh, well I don't tend to wait 3-5 minutes for a single .jpeg to load on a website any more. That was not true on 56k in the late 90s. On a baud modem in 93, sure, but I wasn't talking about that. As for software load speed, the amount of data being loaded off a CD for a 2d or older 3d game is magnitudes smaller than the data being loaded from modern games. Irrelevant. The amount of multimedia on a CD was vastly mo…
Well I was talking about 97-99 as far as internet browsing went. I don't really remember the internet before that. I wasn't allowed fuck around too much when we had dialup it cost too much. Yes it really was that slow. That was when I first started downloading music and TV shows. I vividly remember the waiting.
>Irrelevant. The amount of multimedia on a CD was vastly more than the main memory available at the time.
I don't follow. It's not like all available memory is ever used to load things from storage. All I know is, I can copy an 8GB DVD on my current computer with 6GB of RAM faster than I could have copied a 756MB CD with around 500MB of RAM.
I do agree nothing is optimized as well, but that's some hard nostalgia goggles talking there.
Re: Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash (2001)
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dunno... I recall loading stuff off cassette tapes onto C64. But I was there in the 90s, too. Sure, the load times on an NES are better than, say Fallout 4, but I remember starting up Ultima 8 for the first time and that was some sincere amount of wait. I think that things are much better now, at least in the few games I've played in the last couple of years (Bioshock, Detroit: Become Human, Fallout 4, Red Dead II)…
The content is way more developed, and instead of loading a pile of floppies Ahhhh ok you got me there. Floppies were terrible, and playing games on a low end DOS machine was terribly slow. I have played modern games that were about as frustrating though, but only if they're completely broken. I was referring to game consoles though. Load times on Sega CD on 3DO were terrible for the time and turned off a lot of cons…
I remember when I tried to run Doom on my old 386 HP and man was it slow haha.
I think nowadays, these online arena games take forever to load. Back in the 90s it was all about loading and performance. Quite the shift in gamer expectations.
Re: Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash (2001)
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uhhhh, well I don't tend to wait 3-5 minutes for a single .jpeg to load on a website any more. That was not true on 56k in the late 90s. On a baud modem in 93, sure, but I wasn't talking about that. As for software load speed, the amount of data being loaded off a CD for a 2d or older 3d game is magnitudes smaller than the data being loaded from modern games. Irrelevant. The amount of multimedia on a CD was vastly mo…
Well I was talking about 97-99 as far as internet browsing went. I don't really remember the internet before that. I wasn't allowed fuck around too much when we had dialup it cost too much. Yes it really was that slow. That was when I first started downloading music and TV shows. I vividly remember the waiting. >Irrelevant. The amount of multimedia on a CD was vastly more than the main memory available at the time. I…
I mean the file size comparison doesn't really apply, because hardware back then had many limitations anyway.
We should be seeing much better load times than we are given current hardware, not incrementally better or even worse. Which is the reality, since no one optimizes anymore.
Re: Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash (2001)
#75"Is performance still an issue in this era of cheap 486 computers and super-fast Pentium computers? You bet. How many programs that you use really run so fast that you wouldn't be happier if they ran faster? We're so used to slow software that when a compile-and-link sequence that took two minutes on a PC takes just ten seconds on a 486 computer, we're ecstatic—when in truth we should be settling for nothing less tha…
Re: Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash (2001)
#76Questions for experts: are part of this "timeless" and still relevant today, or is it mostly historical ? (Chapter titles like "Pushing the 286 and 386" are a bit scary :D)
Some parts are timeless, like this introduction in the first chapter about optimization: --- Understanding High Performance Before we can create high-performance code, we must understand what high performance is. The objective (not always attained) in creating high-performance software is to make the software able to carry out its appointed tasks so rapidly that it responds instantaneously, as far as the user is conc…
Think about the software you work on and maintain day to day: how much of it runs so fast that any further improvement in the code would be pointless? Truly we have strayed far from the light...
Re: Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash (2001)
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
The content is way more developed, and instead of loading a pile of floppies Ahhhh ok you got me there. Floppies were terrible, and playing games on a low end DOS machine was terribly slow. I have played modern games that were about as frustrating though, but only if they're completely broken. I was referring to game consoles though. Load times on Sega CD on 3DO were terrible for the time and turned off a lot of cons…
I remember when I tried to run Doom on my old 386 HP and man was it slow haha. I think nowadays, these online arena games take forever to load. Back in the 90s it was all about loading and performance. Quite the shift in gamer expectations.
I remember thinking I was a badass because I filled Wolf3d's resource meters all the way up.
I think one of the first actually useful programs I've written in my life was a conditional in the autoexec.bat script that let me choose different memory configurations. What fun times :D
Re: Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash (2001)
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I dunno... I recall loading stuff off cassette tapes onto C64. But I was there in the 90s, too. Sure, the load times on an NES are better than, say Fallout 4, but I remember starting up Ultima 8 for the first time and that was some sincere amount of wait. I think that things are much better now, at least in the few games I've played in the last couple of years (Bioshock, Detroit: Become Human, Fallout 4, Red Dead II)…
The content is way more developed, and instead of loading a pile of floppies Ahhhh ok you got me there. Floppies were terrible, and playing games on a low end DOS machine was terribly slow. I have played modern games that were about as frustrating though, but only if they're completely broken. I was referring to game consoles though. Load times on Sega CD on 3DO were terrible for the time and turned off a lot of cons…
Yeah I grok what you're saying.
I personally only game in short bursts so it's not a big deal to me to let the machine spend a whole damn day downloading fallout over a 10Mb DSL line.
I mean, that was better than spending the whole night DLing Commander Keen.
My view is that there's a certain amount of time that I'm willing to wait for certain interactions, and that's pretty consistent regardless of the tech stack. So if I have to wait a bit, I do.
I'm far less patient with things like keyboard shortcuts, UX interactions... but I feel like a lot of those really have gotten way, way better (like, no more floppies). Perforamnce is just one aspect of UX, and while you're right that it could obviously be better, there are so many other parts that are so much better (and performance really isn't worse that it was when I was playing Police Quest V).
Re: Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash (2001)
#79I read it long time ago, good book!
Re: Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash (2001)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some parts are timeless, like this introduction in the first chapter about optimization: --- Understanding High Performance Before we can create high-performance code, we must understand what high performance is. The objective (not always attained) in creating high-performance software is to make the software able to carry out its appointed tasks so rapidly that it responds instantaneously, as far as the user is conc…
Think about the software you work on and maintain day to day: how much of it runs so fast that any further improvement in the code would be pointless ? Truly we have strayed far from the light...
Well, i work in a AAA game engine that needs to run on consoles, so... :-P
(though i work mostly on tools nowadays but even then, optimization is important - from my experience people wont tell you that the tool is slow, but they'll really like it if you make it faster, which is why i always dismiss comments like "people like Electron/otherslowstuff, otherwise they wouldn't use it" as way more often than not, people wont tell you about something being slow and they'd rather get used to it, unless it REALLY affects them in a major way)