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by Const-me 2703 days ago
> I am deeply convinced that it is impossible to write efficient applications using 3D libraries without understanding this.

What he explains is almost irrelevant for efficiency. Other things are relevant: early Z, tiled rendering, other things about architecture of GPUs: resource types, cache hierarchy, fixed-function pipeline steps, these warps, many others.

> I care about the concepts.

I've been programming C++ for living since 2000, about half of that time something relevant to 3D graphics, both games and CAD. You no longer need deep understanding of rasterizer. Vague understanding of what the hardware does, and how to control it, is enough already. Only people working in companies like nVidia or Chaos Group need that info, IMO.
1 comments
mcbits 2703 days ago
Yes, irrelevant, because the article is simply describing how to combine a sphere+bumps+noise to look like an explosion.

Your project seems to be interesting in its own way, but I don't see why you'd juxtapose it with this tutorial, other than that they both involve pixels.

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Const-me 2703 days ago
The project was just an example of HN bias against GPUs. At least for doing graphics on GPUs.

Try searching "GPU" on this site. 100% of the first page of results are about using GPGPU in the clouds. Do you think that matches what people buy GPUs for, or amount of code developers white for them?

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mcbits 2703 days ago
I searched "GPU" and almost all of the top results were people doing weird/unusual things with the GPU: terminal emulator, Postgres query acceleration, stripped down HTML engine, APL compiler, etc. A search of "Direct3D" suggests HN doesn't have much interest in Direct3D, though.
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Const-me 2702 days ago
> weird/unusual things with the GPU: terminal emulator, Postgres query acceleration, stripped down HTML engine, APL compiler

Exactly. People here mostly do general-purpose computations on them, despite “G” stands for graphics.

Search for “Graphics”, and the majority of top results are for CPU-based stuff, pixel graphics in terminal, python, Skia. There’re some results for GPU-based graphics, like graphic studies for MGS and GTA, but they’re minority.

I think graphics is how the majority of users use their hardware for, but it’s under-represented here.

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