Hacker News Reader

> tasked with optimizing the cloth simulation code in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. It had been fine tuned extensively with PowerPC intrinsics for the Xbox 360 but its performance was lacking on XboxOne (x64).

Sounds to me like they were recycling some old cloth simulation code from previous games and it needed to be optimized for Xbox one for the release of the new game.

View on HN

Correct, their game engine has been around since the very first Tomb Raider and even before that. The code evolved over the years of course and the cloth simulation code as well. Shadow of the Tomb Raider used much more cloth in the environment and on the characters than previous games and it needed a bit of help. I don't remember off the top of my head how much I managed to speed it up but tuning the assembly for x64 and SSE yielded a 1.5-2x speedup over the old code due to various optimizations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com