My fellow Antipodean Justin Couch wrote:
> If people are really interested in knowing some basic
> performance optimisations, the SGI guys run a course
> every year a Siggraph called Advanced Rendering
> Optimisations (I think).
For those of us who can't make it to SIGGRAPH etc., but who
are interested in digging a bit deeper "under the hood" (as
it were), check out Michael Abrash's "Graphics Programming
Black Book", now available for free as 130MB of PDFs via the
Dr. Dobb's web site
(http://www.ddj.com/articles/2001/0165/0165f/0165f.htm).
This guy is the Obi Wan Kenobi to John Carmack's Luke
Skywalker, if you'll forgive the allusion. Even if he has
recently crossed over to the Dark Side (he now hacks the
X-Box for Microsoft).
>From the blurb on the site:
Michael Abrash's classic Graphics Programming Black Book
is a compilation of Michael's previous writings on
assembly language and graphics programming (including
from his "Graphics Programming" column in Dr. Dobb's
Journal). Much of the focus of this book is on profiling
and code testing, as well as performance optimization. It
also explores much of the technology behind the Doom and
Quake 3-D games, and 3-D graphics problems such as
texture mapping, hidden surface removal, and the like.
Thanks to Michael for making this book available.
The full text of the book is available here and on
several mirror sites in PDF format. The complete
collection of source code listings from the book is also
available.
The book also indirectly illustrates the drawback with
learning about performance optimisation: by neccessity, the
knowledge acquired is closely tied to particular bits of
hardware (he covers the 286, 386, 486, EGA & VGA; who's even
heard of Mode X these days?), and when those bits become
obsolete, so does much of your knowledge. Your skills,
however, along with the underlying principles, you get to
keep.
What does all this have to do with Java 3D? Well, I'm using
Java 3D precisely because it is such a successful
"middle-level" API; I don't *have* to know this lower-level,
"background" stuff to produce 3D graphics quickly. But I
still want to produce a quality product, and for that
there's no substitute for going back and studying the
underlying technology. And from reading the messages on this
list, I think I'm not the only one who needs to learn more
about this stuff. ;)
John :^P
--
John Pallister
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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