performance optimization

Casey Muratori shows how fast a terminal renderer can run, building a simple reference renderer that handles Unicode and colored text far quicker than Windows Terminal. He argues that common excuses for slow terminals do not hold up.

Casey Muratori follows up his refterm proof-of-concept, a GPU-based terminal renderer, with a second part covering memory usage, glyph sizing and correct Unicode and VT handling. It is built to show that a terminal can be fast and correct without heroic effort.

Nick Caston compares Unity's sample ECS/DOTS project (AngryBots) with his own from-scratch C++ and OpenGL clone. He benchmarks performance and discusses the effort involved in each approach.

A short Microsoft promo comparing classic Teams with the rewritten new Teams side by side, claiming faster startup and better performance. The new version is shown taking around nine seconds to launch.

A short side-by-side recording by Jake Archibald of the same animation demo running in Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Servo WebRender nightlies on a 60Hz display. It shows the smoothness difference of GPU-based rendering.

A live-coded demo by Jonathan Blow showing how to get object-system-style expressiveness in a data-oriented way, covering structure-of-arrays layouts and composition. It shows features of his Jai language that make programs fast.

The winning demo from Revision 2015's oldskool competition, running on a real 1981 IBM PC with CGA at 4.77MHz. It uses extreme tricks to produce effects, graphics and sound far beyond what the hardware was thought capable of.

A short demo showing slow 2D drawing in the Windows 7 GUI compared with XP. It attributes the slowdown to the display driver model lacking hardware accelerated GDI.

A Tiny Desk concert in which pianist Dan Tepfer plays with a Disklavier player piano driven by a program he wrote that responds to his playing. He performs four pieces from his Natural Machines project.

A two-minute 2008 clip from Sun's Fishworks team in which Brendan Gregg uses DTrace to show disk latency spiking while he shouts at a rack of drives. Bryan Cantrill narrates the demonstration.

MattKC fits a playable Snake game into a QR code by writing tiny x86 machine code and patching the ZBar scanner so it can run the decoded data.

Casey Muratori captures CygnusEd Professional running on an Amiga 2000, showing how smoothly it scrolled text. He notes the real effect is better on a period CRT.

A one-minute clip of Rochus Keller performing as a one-man band: slap bass with the left hand, Rhodes and lead guitar with the right, and drums with the feet.

A ten-minute card-magic act by Dani DaOrtiz performed on Penn & Teller: Fool Us in 2022. It is built on timing, misdirection and psychology, and the method defeated the show's hosts.

A hobbyist compares vertical bifacial solar panels against south-facing angled panels using winter production results. It tests whether the usual mounting approach is actually best.

A Microsoft Research demo from TechFest 2012 of a lab touch system that lets viewers feel the effect of different input latencies, down to about 1 ms. It shows how much more responsive dragging feels compared with typical 100 ms touch delay.

A one-minute clip of slime mold placed on a map with food at the cities around Tokyo, growing a network that approximates the Tokyo-area railway system.

A Samsung-backed viral demo that builds a fast computer from 24 256GB MLC SSDs in a RAID 0 array and shows the throughput results.

A short side-by-side demo of a large image loading over a slow connection in JPEG, progressive mozjpeg, JPEG XL and AVIF. It shows how each codec renders partial data.

A 2013 research demo of simulated bipedal creatures whose natural gaits are found by optimizing muscle-based controllers, with no motion capture or keyframe animation. It shows physics-based walking and running emerging from musculoskeletal models.

A one-minute NVIDIA research demo of foveated rendering for VR using SMI eye tracking. It renders at full detail only where the eye is looking, matching the physiology of human vision.

A Dyalog demonstration of developing a Sudoku solver in APL, using an algorithm by Arthur Whitney with performance work by John Scholes. The narration steps through the array-oriented solution.

Full gameplay of .kkrieger, a first-person shooter by Farbrausch that fits into a 96KB executable by generating its textures, models and sounds procedurally.

Sam Aaron live codes an ambient electronic set using Sonic Pi, the music programming environment he created. The performance shows code driving music in real time.

A long live-coded DJ set in which Sam Aaron creates all the music in real time by writing code in his Sonic Pi system. It demonstrates algorithmic electronic music performance.

Linus Tech Tips opens up an M1 MacBook Air to test whether better thermal pads could improve performance in the fanless design. It looks at what Apple left on the table.

Red Bull and the Dutch Drone Gods follow Max Verstappen's RB20 F1 car around Silverstone in a single FPV shot using a custom drone that accelerates to 300 km/h in about four seconds. The video also covers the year of development behind the drone.

Gamers Nexus builds a fully ray-traced demo in Unreal Engine to compare faked global illumination with RTX ray-traced GI. It covers the gains in dynamic scenes and accuracy against the performance cost and noise.

Linus Tech Tips tests whether higher frame rates and refresh rates improve gaming performance, using Shroud and other players on aim and reaction tests at 60, 144 and 240Hz. The video is sponsored by Nvidia.

Linus Tech Tips tests whether chaining many PCIe riser extensions causes loss of GPU performance. They keep adding extensions to see how far the signal will go.

Road & Track puts a 2014 Porsche 911 Turbo through 50 back-to-back launch-control runs on a SoCal runway. The car completes 61 launches before the testers lose count.

A demo of Deldo, an Emacs package that lets Emacs hooks trigger vibration events on computer-controllable sex toys. It is an absurd teledildonics project that is half performance art.

Fully Charged gets an exclusive first drive of the Porsche Taycan, running 0-200 km/h launch control repeatedly. It covers the car's twin-motor 800-volt specs, claimed range and fast charging.

Boston Dynamics shows its Atlas humanoid robot performing a gymnastics and parkour routine, using optimization-generated motions and a model predictive controller.

A live performance at AGDQ 2014 in which Super Mario World is made to execute arbitrary injected code, running other games like Pong and Snake on the cartridge. It is done through a TASBot feeding precise controller inputs.

Gamers Nexus benchmarks GPU gaming performance on Linux using the Bazzite OS, an exploratory first step toward establishing a Linux testing methodology. It compares results against Windows and notes where Linux still falls short.