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The medium of video games is quite young, but even younger is the journalistic structure picking apart its technological underpinnings–we’ve grown accustomed to benchmarks and resolution/framerate analyses of PC games, but Digital Foundry was arguably the first to democratize coverage of game rendering technologies agnostic of which platform developer technical magic occurs on. One relatively-recent addition to the team — Alexander Battaglia — exudes so clearly a profound passion for games’ technological makeup that as a dilettante in engine documentations and SIGGRAPH presentations, it was hard for me to deny him an invitation to speak on a topic we both share a great affinity for–I approached him hardly expecting a response, but Alex proved my assumption wrong and gleefully obliged.
To contrast my formative experiences with video games against Alex’s, the first machine I’d ever truly played games on was an old Pentium 4 PC with 128MB of RAM — about as big as some modern CPUs’ L3 cache — and an SiS AGP discrete GPU, later upgraded to a GeForce FX 5500–it was a time when computer graphics were not very sophisticated, but early dabblings into 3D gaming inspired awe regardless. I’d play and gawk over the id Tech-powered Return to Castle Wolfenstein as its low-poly look sufficed plenty then–as it turns out, Alex’s experiences were not too dissimilar. “[What first spurred my interest was] seeing my father playing Wolfenstein 3D on PC, the first one. So it was that, Doom, and Doom 2 thereafter I watched my father play through and I tried to get at it myself but I found it terrifying and also I was a little too young and probably frustrated with the controls to actually beat a lot of levels other than the first couple,” he told me. “After that, I did get into playing PC games with my brothers and friends from down the street where I grew up, but the things that actually got me into the technological aspect behind games were landmark titles where I was starting to read more about [them] on the internet–not just being interested in them casually through friends or just in a social context. It was…
