[erikbc]

"Let's not pretend that banging out something in Cg is PhD-level shit."

Almost everything you implement in CG is "PhD-level shit". Implementing techniques from SIGGRAPH papers in your game engine are usually non-trivial. Game engines/games are some of the most complex systems in software engineering, the complexity can't be compared to web apps at all.

[hythloday]

I think by CG you mean computer graphics? Cg was nVidia's shader language that compiled to HLSL or GLSL. Writing shaders is sometimes serious business but more often than not it's just as drudgey as writing CRUD pages.