Michael Abrash's graphics programming black book

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1. immmmmmOct 2026
   Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book is still one of my all time favourite. What they did back then was almost black magic. I learned a good part of maths, cs and physics trying to mod id1 with this book during my teenaghood.
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2. klaussilveiraSep 2025
   Michael Abrash is a legend. His work was influential on John Carmack's earlier works at id software, in particular the Keen engine and Wolfenstein 3D. And then Carmack brought him to work on the Quake engine. John Carmack on Abrash:

   >> If you have any interest in programming, you should look at Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book Special Edition. It has just about everything he has written, from the ancient work on optimizing for the 8086 (still interesting to read) to the articles written during quake's development.

   His overview of the Quake 3D engine: https://www.bluesnews.com/abrash/chap70.shtml

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3. joeld42Feb 2025
   The one that had the most personal influence on me was the chapter from Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book: https://www.phatcode.net/res/224/files/html/ch17/17-01.html#...

   CPU are very different these days, but the process he goes through is essentially unchanged.

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4. croesOct 2023
   Maybe a generation thing, I remember reading Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book and learning a lot about cycle eaters in the CPU.
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5. shallichangeFeb 2023
   You'll find a bunch of tech recruiters asking you about Big O notation for the algorithm you propose. They want to look smart. Most of the times you'll smell shitty code, inefficient loops, slow I/O, waste of memory without formal methods.

   An old example from the beginning of the century: if you did matrix algebra you could have understood how to rotate an object position in 3D for a game using math but find it very hard to code. Or you could take Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book [1] and learn it anyway. You'll do fine.

   [1] https://www.jagregory.com/abrash-black-book/#a-simple-3-d-ex...

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6. phireSep 2022
   Not quite what you want, but Michael Abrash’s Graphics Programming Black Book is available for free online, and covers the software rendering side of computer graphics in the early-mid 90s, ending at Quake, just before 3d accelerators hit the scene.

   There are a few anecdotes from hardware designers of 2d graphics cards mixed in, but the bulk of the book is about writing optimised x86 assembly (don't follow the any of it's advice these days) and writing fast polygon rasterisers.

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