Got a new demo out today. It’s something that some people (including me) call vector textures. A very interesting technique that uses the existing texture resizing methods implemented on the GPU. These days it’s hard to find graphics techniques that manage really makes use of everything the GPU provides us with. What’s even nicer is that this technique could improve existing methods of rendering things like text and could even be extended to rendering blades of grass or leaves on a tree where the possibility of zooming in to a leaf is very real.

Go ahead, read more about it and download the demo here

As with every new programmer I would spend endless hours trying to squeeze optimization out of every small piece of code on my engine . I wanted it to be the fastest. I always thought that writing every line of code in assembly would make a super fast engine, not knowing that the compiler would probably optimize my code better. I would spend long hours studying SSE instructions. Well one advantage is that I am no longer afraid of ASM , but I was generally unhappy that my engine was not be super optimized and nearly as fast as a commercial game, even though it was probably doing only 25% of the tasks. Colleagues (just as inexperienced as me at the time) would come up to me and say 'Hey, you know this guy, he wrote a whole OS in assembly'. And we would all think that this guy wrote the best OS in the world. But hey, wait a minute. Then why are over 80% of the desktops still using Windows?