Optimizing is a game of trade-offs.

There are many anecdotes, articles, and books about optimizing in specific scenarios. Sometimes, these include hard numbers; if so, it’s usually for hardware that is several years old. Often, the discussion is very specific, such as optimizing memory copies for a specific chip, and the advice is frequently hard to apply for a project that needs to run well on a wide variety of hardware.

Video Game Optimization is a discussion of optimization from theory to practice. It is our hope that, even as hardware architectures come and go, the basic lessons of optimization will remain useful to you.

In addition to covering the abstract, we also measure real-world performance of different techniques using a performance test harness. Binaries and source code are included, so that when you are on new hardware, you can run the harness and get the “lay of the land” for that hardware’s performance characteristics.

"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.