Top all-time · #1650
Richard Geldreich
Personal blog · richg42.blogspot.comprogramminggamessystems
Richard Geldreich's personal blog at richg42.blogspot.com covers programming, games and systems. Since 2014, 43 different Hacker News readers have linked it 72 times, most often “The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (21) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link his posts on GPU and OpenGL driver quality, game development, and compression libraries such as miniz and Crunch, plus commentary on open-plan offices and Holacracy.
- Recommended for · 2 comments
- One commenter calls it a good explanation of the problems game developers face with managed languages; another calls his OpenGL driver post revealing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 21 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Co-owner of Binomial LLC, working on GPU texture interchange. Open source developer, Open Geospatial Consortium member, graphics programmer, former video game developer. Worked previously at SpaceX (Starlink), Valve, Ensemble Studios (Microsoft), DICE Canada.
Most-linked posts?
- The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality4 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2014-05-12
- Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-02-15
- CPNG, "Compatible Network Graphics", a backwards compatible fork of PNG3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-12-06
- Compression Is Compilation3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-12-24
- Open Office Spaces and Cabal Rooms Suck3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-01-02
- Lessons learned while fixing memory leaks in our first Unity title3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-05-22
- Tech company patterns2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-11-01
- The future of GPU texture compression2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-12-08
- The Near-Lossless Image Formats Using Ultra-Fast LZ Codecs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-04-02
What Hacker News says?
I think you had a maladjusted TV or something. On a good TV or composite monitor, pixel art should have fairly sharp edges. Most televisions had adjustment controls for various thing (sharpness, contrast, tint, color, etc); so many people didn't know how to properly adjust them, though. My first video game system was a cheapo b/w pong clone knockoff thing from radio shack. My second was an Atari 2600. Later my paren…
Comment linking /2014/02/the-little-known-color-computer-3s-256.html
on “Why All of Our Games Look Like Crap”Submitted Things learned while running your own self-funded startup as a story · 404 points
HN discussionI researched Valve quite a bit before applying there (I did not get in, but one of their senior team members wrote me a nice message). Some interesting bits I found: - The average engineer there makes at least $400k/year with bonuses, although it could be much more (or less, if they somehow wind up in a bad project). IIRC Valve makes around $2m of profit for every head in the company (they only have ~300 employees o…
Comment linking /2015/01/open-office-spaces-and-cabal-rooms-suck.html
on “Valve – Handbook for New Employees (2012) [pdf]”Submitted Tech company patterns as a story · 389 points
HN discussionIn this discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8911369 someone quoted this page http://mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html as saying it compiles to about 150k. I can't find the current listing, but I'm on mobile :/ Btw: the author's blog talks about LZHAM quite a bit http://richg42.blogspot.com/ edit: Looks like it's up to 190k Compression Compressed size Decompresser Total size Time (ns/byte) Program Options enwi…
Comment linking /
on “Brendan Eich: WebAssembly is a game-changer”Submitted Lessons learned while developing Age of Empires 1 Definitive Edition as a story · 277 points
HN discussionpeople say that but much of the time AMD has excluded themselves from consideration for other reasons. 5000 series, 7000/200 series, and 480/Vega series all saw major cryptomining booms that raised prices far beyond those of the equivalent NVIDIA cards, so for much of the time they were simply not priced competitively. Like, for almost a year you would have to pay $1000+ for a Vega that barely matched a 1080 while y…
Comment linking /2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-quality.html
on “Nvidia’s Integration Dreams”Submitted Age of Empires Definitive Edition's pathing and movement as a story · 230 points
HN discussionSomewhat related, one of the developers discussed some of the issues he faced when working with the re-mastered "Age of Empires: Definitive Edition". https://richg42.blogspot.com/2018/02/some-lessons-learned-wh...
Comment linking /2018/02/some-lessons-learned-while-developing.html
on “Game Programming Patterns: Event Queue (2014)”Submitted The Truth on OpenGL Driver Quality as a story · 165 points
HN discussionOpenCL had a bit of a "second-mover curse" where instead of trying to solve one problem (GPGPU acceleration) it tried to solve everything (a generalized framework for heterogeneous dispatch) and it just kinda sucks to actually use. It's not that it's slower or faster, in principle it should be the same speed when dispatched to the hardware (+/- any C/C++ optimization gotchas of course), but it just requires an obsce…
Comment linking /2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-quality.html
on “Nvidia in the Valley”Submitted Lz_xor as a story · 156 points
HN discussionMinor nitpick: using LZMA to compress large text files like this before distribution is normally better; here 7z is LZMA, zip is DEFLATE: 739M 2013_data 37M 2013_data.7z 78M 2013_data.zip Using [1] for reference, if the download speed is less than ~20MB/s, LZMA is faster than DEFLATE. Though, the data there is a bit less compressible than these csv files, so the break-even point for transfer rate would be higher her…
Comment linking /2015/01/parallelized-downloaddecomp-with.html
on “Hard Drive Data Sets”Submitted Things that drive me nuts about OpenGL as a story · 97 points
HN discussionThe initial link in this piece, Compression is Compilation, was really helpful to read before reading this piece: http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/10/compression-is-compilati... . I think I got more out of it than this piece.
Comment linking /2015/10/compression-is-compilation.html
on “Lz_xor”Submitted The “Faster Zombies” blog post as a story · 92 points
HN discussionIt's not that you couldn't write a triple A game with a managed language. It's that you can _quite easily_ write a triple A game without using a managed language. For games, managing memory is not a big problem. For other kinds of apps, it can be. In some apps the lifetime of an object is not well defined. But in games, it tends to be very well defined. If you want a good explanation of the problems game developers…
Comment linking /2015/05/lessons-learned-while-fixing-memory.html
on “Memory and C++ Debugging at Electronic Arts [video]”Submitted State of Linux Gaming as a story · 89 points
HN discussionhttps://richg42.blogspot.com/2016/08/rads-ground-breaking-lo...
Comment linking /2016/08/rads-ground-breaking-lossless.html
on “Improving compression at scale with Zstandard”Submitted RAD's ground breaking lossless compression product benchmarked as a story · 80 points
HN discussionWhat was this write up? This one? http://richg42.blogspot.com/2018/02/some-lessons-learned-whi...
Comment linking /2018/02/some-lessons-learned-while-developing.html
on “Show HN: Unity MMORPG Boilerplate – Multiplayer in Unity Made Easy”Submitted “Crunch” Open Source Texture Compression Library vs. U.S. Patent (2012) as a story · 29 points
HN discussionOn the CoCo 3 you didn't have to hit reset; there was a way to switch it in software. Also on the CoCo 3, there was the 640 x 192 4-color "hires" mode. Way, way back - I believe published in Hot CoCo - someone figured out that using a television, and setting those 4 colors to the grayscale in the 64 color palette (black, dark grey, light grey, and white) - and with proper 4-bit pixel settings, you could get a virtua…
Comment linking /2014/02/the-little-known-color-computer-3s-256.html
on “Oldschool planar graphics and why they were a good idea”Submitted Zlib in serious danger of becoming obsolete as a story · 26 points
HN discussionIt didn't work. See Rich Geldreich's blog, http://richg42.blogspot.com/ . People still try and optimize for looking good vs their coworkers on other teams vs simply doing the best work possible. Examples, http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/01/open-office-spaces-and-c... , http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/01/microsofts-digs.html
Comment linking /2015/01/microsofts-digs.html
on “Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh: Adopt Holacracy Or Leave”Submitted Why I left Unity as a story · 25 points
HN discussionminiz is already on GitHub: http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-great-github-migrati...
Comment linking /2015/05/the-great-github-migration.html
on “Zlib-ng: a performance-oriented fork of zlib”Submitted Faster LZ is not the answer to 150-250 GB video game downloads as a story · 20 points
HN discussionNone. From what I know & I used to write graphics drivers, AMD's closed source driver is horrible. An absolute mess, http://richg42.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driv... Their open source driver is actually more reliable. Qualification: I'm only talking about the opengl driver. I don't know anything about their DirectX driver.
Comment linking /2014/05/the-truth-on-opengl-driver-quality.html
on “AMD Exits Dense Microserver Business, Ends SeaMicro Brand”Submitted The “Faster Zombies” blog post as a story · 17 points
HN discussion
