Top all-time · #229
Fabian Giesen
Personal blog · fgiesen.wordpress.comprogramminggamessystems
Fabian Giesen writes The ryg blog, a personal blog at fgiesen.wordpress.com about programming, games and systems. Since 2011, 202 different Hacker News readers have linked it 385 times, most often “A trip through the graphics pipeline (2011)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Often recommended · 19 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Fabian Giesen's blog for low-level graphics and rendering posts, such as rasterization, the GPU pipeline, and compression, which commenters call great, informative and worth reading.
- Recommended for · 19 comments
- Commenters call its posts great reads, very informative, a good explanation and worth reading.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
When I grow up I'll be an inventor.
Most-linked posts?
- A trip through the graphics pipeline (2011)35 people · 46 mentions · first linked 2014-12-15
- Metaprogramming for madmen (2012)25 people · 37 mentions · first linked 2015-03-23
- The Magic Ring Buffer (2012)11 people · 14 mentions · first linked 2015-02-25
- A whirlwind introduction to dataflow graphs8 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2018-03-05
- Optimizing Software Occlusion Culling8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2015-03-30
- Content Creator7 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2025-07-07
- Oodle 2.9.14 and Intel 13th/14th gen CPUs7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2025-05-22
- A lot of “being smart” consists of getting comfortable with feeling stupid7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2016-02-05
- How many x86 instructions are there?7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2016-08-25
- Reading bits in far too many ways6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2018-02-19
What Hacker News says?
Rough context: When the GPU (or the CPU back in the days) had to draw a texture, it had to sample pixels, maybe one, maybe four and do some say bi-linear filtering in between them, and then use that pixel as a result. Now several problems: 1. If your texture is sampled roughly one pixel from it to one pixel on the screen, and if all pixels are read linearly ("horizontally"), then you are good with the cache, cause f…
Comment linking /2011/01/17/texture-tiling-and-swizzling/
on “Free Lossless Image Format”Submitted Why do CPUs have multiple cache levels? as a story · 309 points
HN discussionalso great read about packing: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for... submitted before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7739599
Comment linking /2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for-madmen/
on “How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1”Submitted Papers I like as a story · 294 points
HN discussionhttps://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through-the-...
Comment linking /2011/07/09/a-trip-through-the-graphics-pipeline-2011-index/
on “No Graphics API”Submitted On AlphaTensor’s new matrix multiplication algorithms as a story · 279 points
HN discussionIt depends if you have static or adaptive coder. Static is much cheaper, uses the same probabilities for the entire data block (e.g. 30 kB), probabilities are stored in the header - practically all Huffman and tANS compressors (however, there are considered exceptions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Huffman_coding ). Adaptive can start with e.g. uniform probability (no need to store in header) and learns on…
Comment linking /2015/12/21/rans-in-practice/
on “Smaller and faster data compression with Zstandard”Submitted Memory bandwidth as a story · 170 points
HN discussionRAD use rANS for their compressors. See ryg's blog [0] for more details, and a bunch more interesting posts about compression and various low-level optimizations. [0] https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2015/12/21/rans-in-practice/
Comment linking /2015/12/21/rans-in-practice/
on “Smaller and faster data compression with Zstandard”Submitted How many x86 instructions are there? as a story · 163 points
HN discussionYeah I find this method way easier to understand than scan conversion. Fabian Giesen has a great series of articles from 2011 that explains it well[0]. Also the original 1988 paper by Pineda is a surprisingly easy read, and it's only 4 pages![1] [0]: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/a-trip-through-the-... [1]: https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.15...
Comment linking /2011/07/06/a-trip-through-the-graphics-pipeline-2011-part-6/
on “Computer Graphics from Scratch”Submitted Metaprogramming for madmen as a story · 134 points
HN discussionIt is not obvious whether big or little endian is better. For a nice overview read https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/little-endian-vs-bi...
Comment linking /2014/10/25/little-endian-vs-big-endian/
on “Freedom and security issues on x86 platforms”Submitted How many x86 instructions are there? (2016) as a story · 132 points
HN discussion> I should probably count up x86 against ARM It is not easy to tell how many instruction there actually are on x86: > https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2016/08/25/how-many-x86-instru...
Comment linking /2016/08/25/how-many-x86-instructions-are-there/
on “Learning to Read X86 Assembly Language”Submitted Reading and writing are less symmetric than you (probably) think as a story · 130 points
HN discussionThen effectively your non-browser container is a browser subset just for your application. You could run a browser and record all the page faults, then remove all the code you didn't run. https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for...
Comment linking /2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for-madmen/
on “3D + 2D: Testing out my cross-platform WASM graphics engine”Submitted Network Latencies and Speed of Light as a story · 127 points
HN discussionThe backstory written by one of the authors is worth a read: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for...
Comment linking /2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for-madmen/
on “We made an animated movie in 8kB”Submitted Low-level x86 code compression for 64k intros as a story · 121 points
HN discussion> How does one get to these positions? - Deep understanding of low-level programming issues: assembly, architectures, caches, DMAs - Experience doing advanced stuff in available platforms like OpenGL, DirectX, Cuda/OpenCL, etc. - Fluency in Maths is not necessary for all low-level development, but will certainly be for physics and graphics work. Check out places like http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/ , http://www.…
Comment linking /
on “A Great Old-Timey Game-Programming Hack”Submitted Zero or Sign Extend as a story · 120 points
HN discussionIf you missed it a couple of weeks ago, this article about its creation was really interesting: http://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for-... ( Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7739599 )
Comment linking /2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for-madmen/
on “A first-person engine in 265 lines of JS”Submitted Reading bits in far too many ways as a story · 117 points
HN discussionThere's a better explanation here: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2022/10/06/on-alphatensors-new... This is for matrix multiplication where elements are themselves 4x4 matrices. So yes, indeed this is about multiplying many many 4x4 matrices where N is the size of the outer matrix.
Comment linking /2022/10/06/on-alphatensors-new-matrix-multiplication-algorithms/
on “Discovering faster matrix multiplication algorithms with reinforcement learning”Submitted SSE: mind the gap as a story · 117 points
HN discussionThe following (can be read in chronological order) give a pretty good idea: - J.E. Smith and G.S. Sohi, "The Microarchitecture of Superscalar Processors," Proc. IEEE, vol. 83 (1995) - ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/sohi/papers/1995/ieee-proc.superscalar.pdf, http://www.eng.ucy.ac.cy/theocharides/Courses/ECE656/supersc... - Tejas S. Karkhanis and James E. Smith. "A First-Order Superscalar Processor Model." (ISCA 2004) - http:…
Comment linking /2018/03/05/a-whirlwind-introduction-to-dataflow-graphs/
on “I Got a Knuth Check for 0x$3.00”Submitted Memory Bandwidth as a story · 114 points
HN discussionReminds me of this article which I'm often drawn back to. https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2010/10/21/finish-your-derivat...
Comment linking /2010/10/21/finish-your-derivations-please/
on “Why the CORDIC algorithm lives rent-free in my head”Submitted Quaternion Differentiation (2012) as a story · 111 points
HN discussion
