All Blog Entries

All blog entries, ordered from most recent. Entry count: 1196.

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# Two articles: Time Measurement in Game Programming, Writing Efficient C++ Code

Fri
25
Sep 2026

I've translated to English and published two of my articles that have been published in Polish in paper magazine "Programista" many years ago. Some of the information may be outdated, but I think they may still be helpful.

I would like to point especially to the first article, and the chapter about Frames per Second (FPS). This unit is really the number of cycles per second: 1/s = Hz, and as such, it is a non-linear mesure in respect to the time it takes to process or render a single frame. Thus, we shoudln't ever say "I improved my game performance by 5 FPS", because it doesn't mean anything without knowing how many FPS did we have before the opimization. Check the article to learn more…

• Time Measurement in Game Programming
• Pomiar czasu w programowaniu gier

• Writing Efficient C++ Code
• Pisanie wydajnego kodu C++

Comments | #math #optimization #productions #c++ Share

# First Look at Epic Games Lore VCS

Thu
18
Jun 2026

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 problems I can see with current version control systems and the improvements a better one could bring, especially for game development. Let's see whether Lore advances any of these topics.

Key pages about Lore:

• https://lore.org/ - home page
• https://github.com/EpicGames/lore - GitHub repository
• Quickstart: Your first Lore repository - quick start tutorial
• Lore CLI command reference - description of all commands
• The Lore Version Control System - lengthy design doc

I didn't test the app myself so far, but I've read some of the docs to get an idea of what it is and how it compares to Git and Perforce. tl;dr: It looks promising, although not revolutionary. Here is a summary and my thoughts.

Comments | #tools Share

# Floor and Ceil Versus Denormals on CPU and GPU

Sat
23
May 2026

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: Hexadecimal value of our input number is 0x807FFFFD.

Comments | #math #gpu Share

# DirectX 12 News from GDC 2026 - My Comments

Sun
15
Mar 2026

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 will gather and summarize these news items, provide links to the appropriate web pages, and include my comments.

When I was working at AMD, I was deeply involved in this area - writing code, publishing articles on the GPUOpen website, attending GDC, and even giving a talk there twice. Back then, I didn’t post much about it on my personal blog, as I would have needed to watch my words and secure corporate approvals. Now, as I’m just a programmer at Plastic - a small game development studio - I can observe these developments from the outside and comment on them freely, which I am going to do with brutal honesty 🙂 If I had a YouTube channel, I would record a “reaction” type of video, but since I’m writing a blog, this will be my reaction in text form.

Disclaimer: Everything in this article is based on information shared publicly by Microsoft and GPU vendors and could be gathered by any graphics programmer. No insider information was used.

Comments | #microsoft #directx Share

# Total Commander - a Plugin Supporting a Custom Archive Format - a New Article

Sat
07
Mar 2026

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 file manager that enables creating and manipulating such an archive, including freely adding and removing files inside it.

The article was first published few months ago in Polish in issue 5/2025 (120) of the Programista magazine. Now I have a right to show it publicly for free, so I share it in two language versions:

• "Total Commander – a Plugin Supporting a Custom Archive Format"
• "Total Commander – wtyczka obsługująca własny format archiwum"

See also GitHub repository with the source code accompanying the article: sawickiap/TotalCommanderPluginTutorial

Comments | #windows Share

# A Formula for Overall System Load

Thu
26
Feb 2026

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, 0...100%. It may be some real device like a computer (with CPU busy %, GPU busy % and the current memory consumption), some vehicle (a car, an airplane), or some virtual contraption, like a spaceship in a sci-fi video game (with the current engine load, force field strength, temperature that can make it overheat, etc.) Apart from the load of the individual subsystems, we want to show a main indicator of the overall system load.

What formula should be used to calculate it? All the load values, displayed as 0...100%, are internally stored as numbers in the range 0.0...1.0. The key principle is that if at least one subsystem is overloaded (at or near 100%), the entire system is considered overloaded. A good formula for the overall system load should have the following properties:

1. The output is 0 if and only if all inputs are 0. In other words, if any subsystem has load >0%, the overall system load is also >0%.
2. The output is 1 if at least one input is 1. In other words, it's enough for one subsystem to be fully loaded at 100% to consider the entire system loaded at 100%.
3. If the output is <1, any increase in any input value should result in some increase in the output value.

Note that these requirements don't specify what happens between 0 and 1. For example, should the output become 0.5 if just one input reaches 0.5, or only after all inputs reach 0.5? We have full freedom here.

#1. My first idea was to use AVERAGE(input[i]). It meets requirement 1 and 3, but it doesn't meet requirement 2, because it requires all inputs to be 1 for the output to become 1.

#2. My second idea was to use MAX(input[i]). It meets requirement 1 and 2, but it doesn't meet requirement 3, because for any input other than the largest one, a change in its value doesn't change the output.

#3. There is a more complex formula that meets all 3 requirements. It may be called the "inverse product" and it looks like this:

output1 = 1.0 - ( (1.0 - input[0]) * (1.0 - input[1]) * ... )

You can think of it as multiplying the "headrooms" left in each subsystem.

#4. Unfortunately, the formula shown above has a tendency to give very high values nearing 100% even for low input values, which is not very user-friendly. A result that is closer to MAX() reflects the overall system load better. Considering this, but still wanting to preserve our requirement 3, I ended up blending AVERAGE() with the inverse product 50/50:

finalOutput = (AVERAGE(input[i]) + output1) * 0.5

Here is an interactive demo of all the formulas described above. You can move the sliders to control the input values.

Further modifications are possible:

• A different blend than 50/50 between the average and the inverse product could be used.
• The final output could be shaped somehow, making it higher or lower in mid values to meet specific design needs, e.g. by raising it to some power, like 1.5.
• While a specific input value increases gradually, there is a sharp transition in the behavior of the output when it becomes the highest of all inputs. It could be smoothed out somehow.

Comments | #math Share

# Graphics APIs – Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow - a New Article

Tue
20
Jan 2026

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 should be understandable and may be engaging for anyone curious about games or graphics, or at least for those who played games in childhood.

The article was first published few months ago in Polish in issue 4/2025 (119) (July/August 2025) of the Programista magazine. Now I have a right to show it publicly for free, so I share it in two language versions:

• "Graphics APIs – Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow"
• "API graficzne – wczoraj, dziś i jutro"

Comments | #productions #directx #vulkan #opengl #rendering Share

# State of GPU Hardware (End of Year 2025) - New Article

Mon
29
Dec 2025

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)" «

Comments | #gpu #hardware #directx Share

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