Optimization for Video Games

I'm working on moving some of what I have been writing to a web page for everyone to read. I really enjoy to making games run as fast as possible.

A lot has changed since Mike Abrash wrote his book, the Zen of Optimization, back in 1994. He writes a lot about using assembly to get the most out of your CPU, since processing, not memory, is usually the bottleneck. Today, assembly won't fix the most common bottlenecks such as drivers, gpu stages, and busses. We can do thousands of operations during the time that it takes to recover from just one cache miss. We can do millions of operations in the time it takes to fetch paged system memory from the hard drive.

Here's a preview of what the web-site is about.

-When optimizing video games, every PC is at a minimum dual core (GPU & CPU)
-Optimizing the incorrect core, or parallel stage, can result in zero FPS gains
-Optimizing anything other than the slowest bottleneck or hotspot is not an efficient use of our time
-Optimizing hotspots smaller than 8% is waste of time
-Optimization is NOT something we do ONLY after we write the code.
-You can make a slow game in OpenGL or DirectX. An API is the interface to the hardware. This sight will focus on the hardware.
-Big "O" notation works great on paper, today's algorithms run on complex hardware. My hardware bubble sort is faster than your software quick sort.

It's only about half written, but I have content for every section (slides, etc.). Hopefully I will be able to convert everything over the next six months or so. I also want to create drill down areas to cover the topics that I assume you already understand. Over time, I hope the information will be more and more valuable as others provide feedback. Any feedback is appreciated. I wasn't too worried about grammar so don't ping me too hard on my writing. I've not real learned on using that part of my brain yet...

http://www.vertexbuffer.com