Everything about Michael Abrash totally explained
Michael Abrash is a highly regarded
technical writer, and one of the top
optimization and
80x86 assembly language programmers, a reputation cemented by his
1990 book
. Unfortunately, the original
8086 processor, the focus of the book, was several generations behind the state of the art by the time the book was published. The much anticipated second volume was never published, but the planned topics were eventually covered in
Zen of Graphics Programming.
In his
1994 book, "", Abrash presents principles and theory applicable to today's programmers. The key point of the book was that performance must always be measured, and the book included a measurement tool called the Zen Timer to check if theoretical code optimizations actually worked. Abrash's systematic presentation of step-wise program refinement empirically demonstrated how algorithm re-design could improve performance up to a factor of 100. Assembly language re-coding, on the other hand, may only improve performance by a factor of 10. Abrash also showed how elusive performance improvement can be. Simply improving performance in one sub-routine would only expose bottlenecks in other routines and so on. Finally, he demonstrated processor-dependent assembly-based performance improvements by comparing assembly language optimizations across X86 family members.
He frequently begins a technical discussion with an anecdote that draws parallels between a real-life experience he's had, and the article's subject matter. Aside from adding personality and wit to what would otherwise be a dry, technical
whitepaper, his prose encourages readers to think out-of-the-box and to approach solving technical problems in an innovative way.
His prolific writings have made their way to numerous publications such as a
Dr. Dobb's Journal column on graphics programming and code optimization,
The Zen and Art of Code Optimization, and his
Graphics Programming Black Book, all of which were influential during their time. His most famous series of articles for
Dr. Dobb's Journal, circa 1991, described an undocumented graphics mode for the
IBM PC which he called
Mode X.
Before getting into technical writing, Abrash was a
game programmer, having written his first commercial game in
1982,
Space Strike (unrelated to the massively multiplayer game of the same name) for the
IBM PC (under
DOS). Other games he wrote were
Cosmic Crusader (
1982) and
Big Top (
1983) for the same system. After working at
Microsoft on graphics and assembly code for
Windows NT 3.1, he returned to the
game industry in the mid-
1990s to work on
Quake for
id Software. Some of the technology behind
Quake is documented in Abrash's
Graphics Programming Black Book. After
Quake was released, Abrash returned to Microsoft to work on natural language research, then moved to the
Xbox team, until
2001. In
2002, Abrash went to work for
RAD Game Tools, where he co-wrote the advanced
Pixomatic software renderer, which emulates the functionality of a
DirectX 7-level graphics card and is used as the software renderer in such games as
Unreal Tournament 2004.
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