Video Game Optimization at Dominant Systems Book Store

"Video Game Optimization" describes a process for increasing the performance of a video game for better gameplay and visual experience. Very few game developers understand the process of optimizing an entire video game, yet learning the process is surprisingly simple and applicable to a broad audience. The book tackles the process of optimization by first describing how to determine where a game is limited and then providing detailed solutions and examples to solving this limitation. All the examples covered in the book can be applied to a variety of game types and coverage of how to optimize system memory, CPU processing, graphics, and shaders is included.

Customer Reviews & Comments
I have worked in the graphics (but not game) industry for a few years. A book dedicated to optimizations sounded interesting both for my own benefit, and as learning material for new engineers on my team. The Introduction could have used a "prerequisites" section. The chapters on graphics, especially, use terms without defining them, e.g. "consider a game with a CPU animation bottleneck caused by having too many bones", p.91. General knowledge of graphics algorithms and terminology is definitely a prerequisite for this book. The two first chapters serve as a good introduction to the book. The concepts of the Optimization Lifecycle, the Levels of Optimization and the Performance Budget certainly seem like a sensible way to structure - and talk about - optimization work. Chapter 3, The Tools, is necessary, but the section on vendor-specific tools is already slightly out-of-date (does not cover Parallel Nsight). This is inevitable, though - and generally the book is very up-to-date. Chapters 4-10 is the core of the book. This is mostly very good - covering both CPU and GPU performance issues. The focus on "Holistic" optimization deserves special mention - it keeps the attention where it needs to be, which is on getting the overall game to run "fast enough" rather than needless cycle-optimization of code that's not on the critical path. That said, it's not perfect. Some parts feel slightly disorganized. For example, Chapter 8 has a section called "Locked Culling" - but there's no (explicit) mention of frustum culling in the preceding chapter. Similarly, including "Lights and Shadows" as one of the "Special Cases" seems quite strange. Also, I'd personally wished for more details - and further analysis of some of the performance results, but given that this is an introduction (and that the source is available) I can't complain too much. Chapters 11-16 consists of various "bits and pieces" of varying usefulness. I got a lot out of the chapter on Managed Languages, which is an area I knew little about. The chapter on Consoles felt unnecessary. It's short (10 pages), and all it really says it that with fixed hardware you can do more tricks. Perhaps focusing on one specific Console platform, or having a chapter on mobile game development (Android/iPhone) would have been more useful? Similarly, the chapter on GPGPU is too short to bring any real value. After an introduction to what GPUGPU is, there's only room for about a page of bottleneck-detection, and then it's finished. Unfortunately, the book seems rushed, in that it's riddled with typos and minor errors. A few examples: * "such as OpenGL's GetLastError()", p.30. GetLastError is a Win32 API, glGetError is what's intended. * "Consistency of frame rate, ..., is more important than the frame rate being too high.", p.33.. I assume "too low" is what's intended. * Figure 10.1 and Figure 10.2 seem to be identical (except the x-axis is shifted). This is problematic since the text asks the reader to compare the graphs. * "As you can see from this graph, ..", p.262. But there's no graph - only a formula. There are also occasions where results are misquoted, e.g., "shows that it's about 100x faster", p.249, but the graph shows that it's about 6x faster. This is a shame since it reduces confidence in the numbers and figures quoted, which limits the usefulness of including these (otherwise very interesting) performance measurements in the first place. Overall, this book has some good content, but it would have been easier to recommend if more of the bugs had been crushed before the book was published.

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