Feature: 'Fast File Loading (Pt. 1)'Feature: 'Fast File Loading (Pt. 1)'

In the first of a two part technical Gamasutra feature, Pyro Studios (Commandos series) tech lead Jesus de Santos Garcia presents a guide for loading streaming data quickly off of media, such as a computer's hard drive. In his introduction, de Santos Garcia says that as processing power and memory size continue to increase, performance improvements in data device speeds are not keeping pace, making new efficient ways of reading data a necessity for games programming: “Reading data efficiently from hard disk and DVD units is vital for video games and one of the more important problems to solve in the next generation of games. While we are getting 20x performance in processing power and memory size, we are only getting 4x performance improvement in data devices (dvd for consoles). I describe in this article how to efficiently read raw data from disk (hdd, dvd) oriented towards streaming files in a realtime application (although the concepts are useful in other areas). The platform used is Win32, but all the topics covered could be easily ported to other platforms.” You can now read the full Gamasutra feature for de Santos Garcia's full breakdown on how to get a 100MB file in the CPU memory as fast as possible, including full Visual Studio 2005 project code (no registration required, please feel free to link to this column from external websites).