Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book

• Includes everything code performance master Michael Abrash has ever written about optimization and realtime graphics.
• Explains Intel CPU operation to a very deep level, including caching, prefetch, branch prediction, and other "black art" performance issues.
• Treats both 2D and 3D graphics in great detail, with an emphasis on speed.
• Contains the industry's best and most detailed coverage of BSP (Binary Space Partitioning) trees, which makes realtime 3D animation possible.
• Features official endorsement of id Software (Quake) and a foreword written by id Software's Technical Director, John Carmack.
• Michael's classic work Zen of Assembly Language
• All projects described in the book including executable files
• The Zen Timer, Michael's legendary code profiling tool

Table of contents

Foreword
Introduction
PART I
Chapter 1 The Best Optimizer Is between Your Ears
Chapter 2 A World Apart
Chapter 3 Assume Nothing
Chapter 4 In the Lair of the Cycle-Eaters
Chapter 5 Crossing the Border
Chapter 6 Looking Past Face Value
Chapter 7 Local Optimization
Chapter 8 Speeding Up C with Assembly Language
Chapter 9 Hints My Readers Gave Me
Chapter 10 Patient Coding, Faster Code
Chapter 11 Pushing the 286 and 386
Chapter 12 Pushing the 486
Chapter 13 Aiming the 486
Chapter 14 Boyer-Moore String
Chapter 15 Linked Lists and Unintended Challenges
Chapter 16 There Ain't No Such Thing as the Fastest Code
Chapter 17 The Game of Life
Chapter 18 It's a Wonderful Life
Chapter 19 Pentium: Not the Same Old Song
Chapter 20 Pentium Rules
Chapter 21 Unleashing the Pentium's V-pipe
Chapter 22 Zenning and the Flexible Mind
PART ll

Chapter 23 Bones and Sinew
Chapter 24 Parallel Processing with the VGA
Chapter 25 VGA Data Machinery
Chapter 26 VGA Write Mode 3
Chapter 27 Yet Another VGA Write Mode
Chapter 28 Reading VGA Memory
Chapter 29 Saving Screens and Other VGA Mysteries
Chapter 30 Video Est Omnis Divisa
Chapter 31 Higher 256-Color Resolution on the VGA
Chapter 32 Be It Resolved: 360x480
Chapter 33 Yogi Bear and Eurythmics Confront VGA Colors
Chapter 34 Changing Colors without Writing Pixels
Chapter 35 Bresenham Is Fast, and Fast Is Good
Chapter 36 The Good, the Bad, and the Run-Sliced
Chapter 37 Dead Cats and Lightning Lines
Chapter 38 The Polygon Primeval
Chapter 39 Fast Convex Polygons
Chapter 40 Of Songs, Taxes, and the Simplicity of Complex Polygons
Chapter 41 Those Way-Down Polygon Nomenclature Blues
Chapter 42 Wu'ed in Haste; Fried, Stewed at Leisure
Chapter 43 Bit-Plane Animation
Chapter 44 Split Screens Save the Page Flipped Day
Chapter 45 Dog Hair and Dirty Rectangles
Chapter 46 Who Was that Masked Image?
Chapter 47 Mode X: 256-Color VGA Magic
Chapter 48 Mode X Marks the Latch
Chapter 49 Mode X 256-Color Animation
Chapter 50 Adding a Dimension
Chapter 51 Sneakers in Space
Chapter 52 Fast 3-D Animation: Meet X-Sharp
Chapter 53 Raw Speed and More
Chapter 54 3-D Shading
Chapter 55 Color Modeling in 256-Color Mode
Chapter 56 Pooh and the Space Station
Chapter 57 10,000 Freshly Sheared Sheep on the Screen
Chapter 58 Heinlein's Crystal Ball, Spock's Brain, and the 9-Cycle Dare
Chapter 59 The Idea of BSP Trees
Chapter 60 Compiling BSP Trees
Chapter 61 Frames of Reference
Chapter 62 One Story, Two Rules, and a BSP Renderer
Chapter 63 Floating-Point for Real-Time 3-D
Chapter 64 Quake's Visible-Surface Determination
Chapter 65 3-D Clipping and Other Thoughts
Chapter 66 Quake's Hidden-Surface Removal
Chapter 67 Sorted Spans in Action
Chapter 68 Quake's Lighting Model
Chapter 69 Surface Caching and Quake's Triangle Models
Chapter 70 Quake: A Post-Mortem and a Glimpse into the Future

Afterword
Index