Graphics programming, game programming, C++, games, Windows, Internet and more...
June 17th, 2026, Epic Games announced Lore - a new version control system for software developers, to compete with Git and Perforce. Being old enough to have worked with the old CVS and SVN, and having experience working with Git and Perforce, I am quite interested in what changes this new system brings. In my article Thoughts Beyond C++ from December 2024, I described my opinion about the…
Recently, I dove deep into floating-point numbers and their behavior. Somehow, this topic haunts me in my programming practice since I created Floating-Point Formats Cheatsheet back in 2013 and also released a comprehensive article The Secrets of Floating-Point Numbers in 2024. This time, I would like to focus on one specific question: What is the result of floor(-1.175493930432748e-38) ? Note:…
Game Developers Conference (GDC) just took place on 9–13 March 2026 (renamed this year to “GDC Festival of Gaming”). Microsoft announced lots of interesting news during the event regarding further development of DirectX 12, its accompanying libraries, and tools. I didn’t attend the conference this year, but the announcements were also published on their DirectX Developer Blog . In this article, I…
Today I would like to present my new article: "Total Commander – a Plugin Supporting a Custom Archive Format". In this article, we will design our own file format that allows multiple files to be packed and compressed into a single archive, similar to formats like ZIP or 7Z. Using the C++ language and the Visual Studio environment on Windows, we will then write a plugin for the Total Commander…
Some time ago I've shared my thoughts about coming up with a nice formula to calculate memory fragmentation . I've recently had another such math puzzle, this time themed around "system load". Below you will find the formula I developed, this time with an interactive demo! The problem is this: Imagine a system that consists of several sub-systems, each having a gauge indicating the current load,…
Today I would like to present my new article: "Graphics APIs – Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow". In this article, we will take a quick walk through the history of graphics APIs such as DirectX, OpenGL, Vulkan, and the accompanying development of graphics cards on the one hand, and video games on the other, over the years. We will not be learning how to program in any of these APIs. This article…
I published a guest article by Dmytro “Boolka” Bulatov, providing an overview of the current GPU market in context of what features are supported on end-users machines: » "State of GPU Hardware (End of Year 2025)" «
I recently got a new Windows PC, which I use for development. I work on a game based on Unreal Engine, and I build both the game and the engine from C++ source code using Visual Studio. From the very beginning, I had an annoying problem with this machine: every first launch of the game took almost five minutes. I don’t mean loading textures, other assets, or getting into gameplay. I mean the…
This article is about a quite niche topic - the functions ClearUnorderedAccessViewUint and ClearUnorderedAccessViewFloat of the ID3D12GraphicsCommandList interface. You may be familiar with them if you are a programmer using DirectX 12. Their official documentation - ClearUnorderedAccessViewUint and ClearUnorderedAccessViewFloat - provides some details, but there is much more to say about their…
Every API needs documentation. Even more so in the case of a graphics API, where there is no single implementation (like in the case of a specific library), but countless users of the API (video games and other graphics apps) and several implementers on the other side of the API (graphics drivers for GPUs from various vendors like AMD, Intel, and Nvidia). Vulkan documentation , for example, is…