Intel technical marketing engineer Brad Werth delivers this week featured video, discussing an informative set of slides on "Optimizing DirectX on Multi-Core Architectures" put together by Intel Applications engineer Leigh Davies.

Referring to Amdahl's Law, which states that "the amount of speed up you can get from a parallel processor is limited by the portion of that work which can only be done serially (or what portion of your game has to run on only one processor and only one core at one time)," Werth notes that for games, that portion of work is generally rendering.

He goes on to advise that developers maximize portions of rendering that can be moved off onto other cores, minimizing aspects of rendering which must be done serially. "You need to be testing this and analyzing it during development. You want to be able to know whether each of the changes you make are in fact optimizations or not in terms of your balance of graphics computations and CPU optimizations."

Posted by Eric Caoili at 02:44 PM | Permalink

Hoping to set budding programmers in the right direction, rendering engineer Angelo Pesce has provided several useful resources for anyone looking to get started with programming and 3D effects.

He begins by suggesting that novices look into Processing: "It's the most fun language I know of, and it's Java basically, so you will do graphics in a mainstream programming language. There are a few tutorials and courses on the processing site itself, there is an incredibly active community, and Java is an incredibly widespread language, you won't have any problems in finding tutorials and books for starters." He went on to also suggest Hackety Hack, a Ruby-based environment targeted at beginners.

Pesce then advises that aspiring programmers try C++ (or C#) and OpenGL. "You could start with the famous NeHe graphics programming tutorials. Another good way is C# and XNA, especially if you have a 360. Then you will need CG to code shaders." From there, programmers should start reading relevant books, papers, and anything else they can get their hands on.

He concludes: "Don't EVER think to know enough. You don't. If you've been programming for 4-5 years and took a 5 years university course, then you will have just the basics that are required to be able to understand almost anything, with some effort. They give you only the alphabet, from there on, there is the real knowledge!"

Posted by Eric Caoili at 11:26 AM | Permalink