Article: "DirectX Creator Says Apple’s Metal Heralds the End of OpenGL"
Links:Alex. St John: "Direct3D, OpenGL, Metal, Full Circle"Time: "DirectX Creator Says Apple’s Metal Heralds the End of OpenGL"According to St. John: "Nearly twenty years later OpenGL still sucks for...
View ArticleState of GL 4.x revealed via "apitest" benchmark
This excellent GL 4.x micro-benchmark that has been making waves recently is really interesting. Now that it's on Phoronix it's about as mainstream as it's going to get: NVIDIA Slaughters AMD Catalyst...
View ArticleMore apitest related links and notes
More apitest related links:OpenGL Stop Breaking my Heartapitest results on AMD comparing various OpenGL and D3D11 approachesSome important things about apitest and the results worth pointing out:1....
View ArticleMoving back to Texas!
My five year, mostly sunless odyssey in the Seattle area is finally coming to an end. I'll be visiting occasionally, but I can't wait to move back to Dallas next month. Thanks to everyone at Valve for...
View ArticleInteresting Talks and Articles
What Your Culture Really Sayshttps://web.archive.org/web/20131025031855/http://blog.prettylittlestatemachine.com/blog/2013/02/20/what-your-culture-really-says/Open Office...
View ArticleState of Linux Gaming
I've got one more blog post before I depart for Dallas. Here's an interesting report showing framerates and loading times of various big titles on Linux vs. Windows:Slashdot: PCGamingWiki Looks Into...
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Open Office Spaces and Cabal Rooms Suck
Caught this new article in the Washington Post:Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace.In case it wasn't clear: I really dislike large open office spaces. (Not 2-3 person...
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Bungie sure packs them in
For the record, my previous post wasn't intended to be focused on Valve in particular (but of course any mention of the big V will be latched on). I used V's offices as an example because it's the last...
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Microsoft's vs. Valve's digs
I can't stand Microsoft's terrible "Modern" UI, but I'll give them props for having an actual Office Innovation Team that actually thinks about this stuff. (Total side note to the OIT people: Choose a...
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Robot Entertainment knows how to make open offices work better
There are precious few public pics available of Robot Entertainment's (The Orcs Must Die people near Dallas, TX - one of the post-Ensemble Studios companies) offices. This is a shame, because they've...
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BonusXP's hybrid office arrangement
After my Valve experience I'm now deeply interested in how companies arrange and maintain the actual space their employees work in. The first thing I do when I enter a studio is look beyond the...
View ArticleUtils/tools to help transition to OSX from Windows
I've developed software under Kubuntu and Windows for years now. I found adapting to Kubuntu from a Windows world to be amazingly easy (ignoring the random Linux driver installation headaches). After a...
View ArticleImproved Unity asset bundle file compression
Download Times MatterSean Cooper, Ryan Inselmann and I have been building a custom lossless archiver designed specifically for Unity asset bundle files. The archiver itself uses several well-known...
View ArticleMore LZHAM notes
It's been a while since I've made any major changes to LZHAM (except for minor cmake related stuff). This was a codec I wrote over a few nights and weekends while I was also working my day job. I...
View ArticleLZHAM v1.0 progress
Ported to OSX, and exposed several new compression/decompression parameters to allow the user to configure some of the codec's inner workings: literal/delta_literal bitmasks (or number of literal/delta...
View ArticleMore LZHAM v1.0 progress
I'm currently seeing overall decompression speedups around 1.8x - 3.8x faster vs. previous LZHAM releases on Unity asset bundle files. On relatively incompressible files (like MP3's), it's around...
View ArticleGood lossless codec API design
I've seen many potentially good lossless codecs come out with almost useless interfaces (or none at all). Here are some attributes I've seen of good codecs:- If you want others to use your codec in...
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LZHAM v1.0 vs. LZMA relative decompression rate on 262 Unity asset bundle files
Going to be honest here, graphing this stuff in a way that makes sense and is useful is tricky and time consuming. I really like the way Rad does it with their lossless data compression library, Oodle....
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Lossless codec performance on Unity asset bundle data
I really like Rad's way of graphing Oodle's (their lossless compression product) overall performance at different disk read (or download) rates. With graphs like this it's easy to determine at a glance...
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Parallelized download+decomp performance of various codecs
I finished porting and testing LZHAM v1.0 on OSX today. Everything works, including multithreaded compression. I've also tuned the Huffman table updating options more. Next stop is iOS.The graphs in...
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