ABSTRACT
This chapter details the specific considerations that apply to graphics in game development, from the platforms on which games run to the game production process. Of all the applications of computer graphics, computer and video games attract perhaps the most attention. The graphics methods selected for a given game have a profound effect, not only on the game engine code, but also on the art asset creation, and even sometimes on the gameplay, or core game mechanics. One of the primary challenges of game graphics is the need to manage multiple pools of limited resources. Each platform imposes its own constraints on hardware resources such as processing time, storage, and memory bandwidth. Game platforms, like any modern computing system, possess multi-stage storage hierarchies, with smaller, faster memory types at the top and larger, slower storage at the bottom.
