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Very tangentially related, but curious if anything thinks it would be worth reading through Abrash's Zen Of Graphics Programming at this point. Is the info in

• spitfire 9y ago
  Go with the black book. I've written a comment about this before but can't be bothered to look for it. The Abrash's black book is both totally outdated and highly relevant. All the technical material is entirely outdated - which probably makes it a better teaching tool. But the methods, approaches and thought processes he describes through the book and the beginning vignettes are priceless. Particularly for me the Video 7 story.
• dr_zoidberg 9y ago
  Still useful in the sense that he teaches how to do profiling right: measure, measure, and measure. Don't just jump to attack the code without profiling, try to reason about the code, try to reason about the algorithms and data structures, and only at the end go for "low level performance tricks" (as in writing everything in assembly). It's an entertaining read, mostly, but you'll surely don't get much from the 386, 486 and Pentium quirks (and cycle counting) to extract the last drop of performance, other that "back in the old days, Pentium would issue 2 instructions at the same time given a very particular set of conditions". But again, as he does focus on analyzing the problem at large, finding the correct algorithm and data structure, it's still useful.