T w e n t y S i d e d

As before: In the process of going through this I’m bound to commit minor omissions, errors, misunderstandings, grammatical errors, or war crimes.

Times are approximate.

28:30 “You can put multiple Titans into a PC and render absolutely incredible amounts of FLOPS and Vertexes and Textels”.

He’s talking about the huge horsepower of top-end PC’s. You can put multiple Titan graphics cards into a single PC so they can share the load and work even faster. (This is insanely expensive, but also insanely fast. I think one Titan will set you back about a thousand bucks, as of this writing.)

FLOPS are FLoating-point Operations Per Second. When we’re talking about how fast a processor can crunch numbers, we often measure performance in FLOPS.

A texel is a “texture pixel”, and in this context it’s basically a measure of how fast the graphics card can fill up the screen with all the stuff it’s trying to render.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Quakecon Keynote 2013 Annotated: Part 3”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

As in years past, I thought I’d step through John Carmack’s keynote and translate some of it into non-programmer talk, because I think there’s a lot here that’s worth talking about. Note that I am not an expert on all these things. I’m just drawing from my increasingly dusty experience as a programmer who long ago specialized in graphics.

The above embed is from IGN. It was the best, most reliable version I could find on YouTube as of this writing. The times given below are approximate.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Quakecon Keynote 2013 Annotated: Part 1”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.