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How Michael Abrash doubled Quake framerate

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Fabien Sanglard

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How Michael Abrash doubled Quake framerate is a technical archaeology article by Fabien Sanglard rebuilding WinQuake with and without Abrash's assembly to test Carmack's claim that hand-written ASM roughly doubled performance.

On a Pentium MMX 233 MHz timedemo, ASM builds score about 42 fps while no-ASM falls to about 23 fps. The post ranks hot routines such as D_DrawSpans8 and R_DrawSurfaceBlock8 and explains Pentium tactics including FPU overlap with fxch, self-modifying constants, loop unrolling, and early FDIV overlap.

It is for intermediate readers interested in historical software rasterization and x86 micro-optimization who know classic Quake renderer structure.

The page is free HTML with diagrams, disassembly comparisons, and notes on rebuilt executables.

It is useful as a measured, function-level account of why Quake's assembly mattered on mid-1990s Intel hardware.