Quake VS abrash-black-book

K5/Cyrix could overlap Integer and FPU operations, what they couldnt do was interleave (pipeline) FPU operations so that multiple floating point instructions ran in parallel.

https://www.phatcode.net/res/224/files/html/ch63/63-02.html

Here a non perspective correction related Quake FPU code example https://github.com/id-Software/Quake/blob/bf4ac424ce754894ac...

    Lcliploop:

Quake seriously wasn't any more complicated. The only thing about Quake that really made it stand out was its 3D engine which, while revolutionary for its time, was basically stone-age technology by modern standards.

You can also read this very old CPMA code that reimplements bunny hopping into Quake 3, a link I'm able to dig up because I have also been playing since literally the first one came out.

I checked this out too, https://github.com/id-Software/Quake expands to a 12.3MB directory for me (excluding .git/, which is another 3MB or so).

Michael Abrash's Graphic Programming Black Book

[Michael Abrash's Black Graphics Programming Black Book from 1997 is a fantastic book I wish I had back then. It is available for free on GitHub. I read it maybe in 2015 and I thought it was fantastic even if it is dated now. It goes through the evolution of PC hardware (CPU and graphics cards in particular) from the very first IBM PC to the mid-90's pentiums, and the last chapter or two are about the author's work on Quake.

Also available in eReader formats: https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book/releases

Also look at the source for original Quake (https://github.com/id-Software/Quake), one of the last pure software-rasterizing AAA 3D PC games. Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book (https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book) explains many of the critical parts of the rendering pipeline.

By the way, quake.exe for DOS was 404,480 bytes.

It's also THICK. I have my copy of the 5th edition right here, and it's about 3 inches from cover to cover. Thicker than Introduction to Algorithms and thicker than the Graphics Programming Black Book.

Read Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book for the story of how the original Quake came to life. You'll get an appreciation for John Carmack's ability to thoroughly research widely varying solutions to a problem, quickly create production-quality implementations of the promising ones, and even more quickly abandon the dead ends. The result is this almost boring, seemingly linear progression toward a final product that seems obvious in hindsight, yet it represents a leap forward the way Quake did in the mid-1990s compared to other FPSes at the time. I don't know many other public stories of individual engineers who can span both the very cutting edge of research and the practicalities of shipping real commercial software.

https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book

The Abrash black book is on github!

Go through Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book to see how it used to be on PC world.