i heard somewhere that to be a good game developer, it helps to have an exstensive knowledge about cokputor hardware (something about cpu's and graphic cards and stuff) can anyone recoomend a good bookor tutorial?

Well the hardware is abstracted away through a library or libraries in alot of cases. I know alot about how it all works but i have never found it explicitly useful when writing graphics code.

Thats my 2 cents

Dave

It would probably be useful to know how the pipelines work, what will stall the card etc.

Your best bet would be to read the specs at ATI/nVidea's websites.

it is not very neccesery to understand how to hardware works.

in the old days , you did not have a directX/openGL package to manage the hardware layer for you. so basicly we (the game developers) had to write our own hardware abstraction layer. remember that in the old days a 3d hardware accelartion or 3d sound card was never exists so the hardware was not that complicated to work with.

I believe it is more important to know the OS internals then the hardware itself these days, for example Memory Managment/Thread Scheduling/TCP internals/Kernel driver/windows native API etc.

knowing the hardware does have an advantage. the lower you get you gain more control.

for example is the SSE/MMX/3dNow instruction set which will help you optimize your code in specific scenarios.

bottom line, if you do not have much time and still have alot to learn in other game development fields, better keep it in lower priority.

cheers,
Nuno1

Well, as the others have said, it's no longer neccesary to know anything other than eactly what you're programming.

But the more you know, the better.
Optimizing your code is a lot easier when you know what goes on under the hood. How the cpu works, how the gpu works, how the OS works, and how they all interact.

So it's not "just" useful for writing SSE code, like Nuno1 suggested. As general background knowledge, it's very useful in general programming too.

But it's not neccesary.

For CPU architecture, I can recommend Computer Organization and Design, and Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, both by Hennessy & Patterson.

spoonbender,

I did not suggest that knowing the hardware only help with SSE. I just gave an example. recheck my post :)

cheers,
Nuno1