[KellyCriterion]

Today, I would not recommend anybody to go into graphics programming:

I started in 2001, when NVidias first Geforce 1 ("the Gigatexl shadercard") was first announced: The field developed since then with so much speed and innovations, it blows my mind of. Compared to what we could do 25years ago, the tech today is just fu*ing impressive.

Though, with this impressiveness comes a big "but": The space is developing at a speed which is really really scary. Nvidia came up with AI-based effects to influence scene & assets on their own - back then, we wouldnt have even thought about that this will be possible some day in realtime.

I do not know if its possible at all to be a "decent pro" in this field now - let me use other words: "Where is todays Jon Carmack?" - he was famous for squeezing everything out of the hardware, using ideas very hidden in the community etc. - today, there is not any competitive moat for people like him (he actually lives on his legacy), and that is because the field is so vast and evolving so fast that there is no chance to become the next one

[sph]

I really dislike people that got into a thing and then try to discourage others. “Don’t be like me! I wasted my entire life” which is bullshit from a jaded person that lost passion. Telling people to stay away from graphics programming is not how to entice tomorrow’s John Carmack.

So here’s another perspective. If all you have done is web apps and Kubernetes, for example, do get into graphics programming. The feedback cycle is exhilarating, and you get to appreciate how mind boggingly fast your average computer is. You’ll get to optimize things that are ultimately unimportant because you have never learned how quick things are at the low level. There are a ton of resources and the maths is not too bad. You might find that 3D modeling is a creative outlet you didn’t know you needed. Even if completely inapplicable to your day job, you’ll find new ways to appreciate the art of programming computers, and might just decide to never touch Kubernetes again and spend the next 5 years writing your own game engine in your spare time. There are a lot of crazy people like that, and the community of hobbyists that are not ground down by life and game dev as a career is larger than you’d think. The Graphics Programming discord is a welcoming place if you want to check it out.

Go for it!

[modeless]

> Don’t be like me! I wasted my entire life

That's not the argument being made here. The field is changing. I had a good career in graphics, my life wasn't wasted at all. That doesn't mean a college student would have the same experience starting today.

[sph]

Well, of course not, unless you are claiming that a future career in graphics is a bad idea, and there is no way you could say that with any reasonable certainty, I do not get the argument at all.

The field is always changing. You could find people in the 80s saying ‘I had a good career in graphics, a college student would not have the same experience starting today’

[reactordev]

100% this. My dad told me not to get into it because of the web (he was a C guy) and instead I went head first into it AND did graphics programming (using C#, ewwww) just for the fun of it. Never discourage from someone wanting to learn, discourage the ego that thinks we need another John Carmack.

[xboxnolifes]

Getting into a field that is changing is the best time to get into that field. The playing field gets equalized and you have more opportunity to be established as a strong expert.

[kansface]

That is not a universal because the incumbents may hold the institutional reigns. See Academy for a counter example.

[readme]

I mean, there's other problems with OPs argument.

For example, "there's no chance to become the next one" implies it's only worth it to do something if you can become the absolute best person in the field.

It's a big world. Most of us will not be the very best at what we do. There are millions of fun games that were not written by John Carmack.

[rustystump]

Who is John Carmack? That old dude from the 90s?

I kid, but there are many other modern Carmacks and id argue even more impressive contributions. The guy has done little since he left gaming.

I wish more people praised Alex Evans. Dreams rendering tech is still unmatched to this day and was my inspiration for graphics, not Carmack.

[pixelpoet]

My man :) Alex Evans has been my gfx coding hero since the 90s with his demoscene work, and I had the privilege of working briefly with him at Lionhead.

[rustystump]

That is amazing and i am jealous.

[michaelchisari]

Seems like a great field to get into if you can make it to the top 5-10% skillset.

The rapid advances, in a trend replicating throughout society, push out the middle in favor of the top.

[readme]

Out of curiosity, which fields would you say are the best to just be mediocre in?

[michaelchisari]

Nepo baby.

Joking (sort of).

I can't say I know of any in the fields I'm familiar with. I've watched tech get increasingly top-heavy since the covid hiring boom and bust, although it was already trending that way.

There are a lot of fields dominated by boomers on the verge of retirement that are the safest bet for people who want to be good and make a good living but don't care to be extraordinary.

I've heard that from arborists, water treatment specialists, actuaries, a few others.

[pfannkuchen]

Has tech really gotten more top heavy?

I feel more like people kept flooding into the middle and bottom, and companies that used to focus on top talent got watered down with those middle and bottom types.

A lot of the people getting laid off from Google and Meta would not have been hired at all in those places 15 years ago, for example.

[dakolli]

Nobody who has ambitions of being the top of their field in engineering wants to be a water treatment specialists, arborist or actuary (maybe actuary if you're a stats nerd). What you're saying is go do something on the based on the potential for you to be professionally successful.. What about people doing things they love?

I hate these people telling people who love to do a certain thing that they should just become a plumber or an electrician. Not everything is about spending your life to make as much pieces of paper the govt tells you are worth something.

I'd rather be in poverty working with computers everyday and doing what I love than make 10k a month being a plumber. I actually can't stand you people.

[bashmelek]

Yeah, like I imagine they mean that as a career it is competitive and demanding while having few openings so you shouldn’t stake your education and future on it, but I’m with you. This is something I really want to learn well enough to contribute the world.

Another staple of HN I abhor is “don’t bother learning this cool thing unless an official IQ test says you are over 150.”

[sph]

I live after the motto of "always disregard the naysayers." If someone tells you a thing is a bad idea, you can safely ignore their advice.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

— George Bernard Shaw

[CrociDB]

Chill down. It's just someone who has a lot of experience in the field making an analysis of the current landscape of the career, using their own as an example.

> Telling people to stay away from graphics programming is not how to entice tomorrow’s John Carmack.

John Carmack was one of the _first_ graphics programmer to ever exist. The next John Carmack can't be in the same field. The same way we can't expect the next Beatles to be playing rock music. :)

[xpct]

Is it so wrong to be doubtful of whether the field is still lucrative? We live in times of great change, it's only natural to be less assured when recommending a career path to others.

[JsonDemWitOster]

Who clicked on this thread looking for career advice??? This discussion is not what I was expecting when I clicked on this thread. What's with the sudden obsession about the field having to be lucrative first? Where's the "hacker spirit" of just wanting to know how stuff works?

Academia was never a lucrative field. For the sacrifices it requires, it will never be financially viable for me to work there. Am I wasting my time going through the Feynman Lectures nonetheless? Keeping my calculus decent? I clicked on this for the same reasons; not looking for career/financial advice, I just have a morbid curiosity about how the sausage is made.

Not to mention, of course, that skills are transferable. Philosophy students don't study Plato because his ideas are relevant to everyday life. His way of thinking/reasoning about problems given his limited means is a timeless skill. I will probably never have to use any direct fact in the Feynman Lectures in my dayjob but learning to think like Feynman is useful when reasoning about large obscure systems which I do encounter daily. FL is not so much an exercise in physics but in the application of the scientific method in general. For software engineering, it nicely compliments Skiena's "The Algorithm Design Manual" IMO.

What I expect to learn from graphics programming:

- it's a good practice for applied maths/vectors/linalg - it's a good practice to learn lowlevel APIs/programming tricks - maybe I'll make a cool game

All of which can also find application elsewhere in computing.

[tayo42]

That sounds nice, but we need to make money and there aren't alot of opportunities. I'd love to get away from web and infra nonsense but,in The right domain id even do it for a pay cut. Hobby work won't get you a job

[KellyCriterion]

No, I said something different:

I said the technology is accelerating at such a scary-high speed, that it is no more fun and very hard to earn any merits today, which was quite possible over the last decades.

(and for me personally: Yes, Im happy to be no more involved, though I profit from this experience very often, even if Im in a completely different sector today)

[bsder]

> I really dislike people that got into a thing and then try to discourage others. “Don’t be like me! I wasted my entire life” which is bullshit from a jaded person that lost passion. Telling people to stay away from graphics programming is not how to entice tomorrow’s John Carmack.

Given that almost everyone who wants to be a "graphics programmer" is also somehow gaming industry adjacent, it is extremely fair to ward them off from the folly. I do the same for anyone wishing to do "VLSI hardware engineering." If you have the skill to do either of those, you almost CERTAINLY have the skill to do something else that is almost as interesting and not saddled by garbage employers.

The primary problem with being a "graphics programmer" beyond a tyro is that the biggest consumer of graphics programmers is the game industry which is a notoriously shitty and wretched industry. Every ... single ... employer. So, from the point of view of future potential, "graphics programmer" has very little upside over pretty much ANY other type of programmers.

Second, "learning graphics programming" is like "learning phone programming", you spend more time fighting godawful software infrastructure more than you do actual programming. AI actually kind of helps this, but it doesn't completely remove the fact that 80% of your knowledge has a half-life of 18-24 months.

Finally, saying "I want to learn graphics programming" is like saying "I want to learn engineering." What "graphics programmer" means is vastly underspecified. 3D game rendering and 3D/2D CAD rendering and 2D vector rendering are completely different skillsets. GPUs are great at the first and kinda okay at the second and kinda lousy at the third. Which kind of "graphics programmer" are you even going to be?

[Animats]

> 3D game rendering and 3D/2D CAD rendering and 2D vector rendering are completely different skillsets.

Actually, no. Autodesk acquired Alias, and got the Maya animation system, in 2005. Soon after, the CAD tools had cinematic quality output. The architectural people loved this - good looking, accurate architectural renders came out. They especially liked that lighting worked, and you could use the CAD system to place real-world light fixtures.

[Toqoz_]

> Second, "learning graphics programming" is like "learning phone programming", you spend more time fighting godawful software infrastructure more than you do actual programming. AI actually kind of helps this, but it doesn't completely remove the fact that 80% of your knowledge has a half-life of 18-24 months.

What kind of knowledge are you talking about here? learnopengl.com is still relevant today for its technical knowledge of fundamental graphics techniques, in spite of OpenGL itself slowly dying. The knowledge itself is overwhelmingly transferable to whatever modern graphics API you’re using.

With mobile development, I can see that you’re mostly learning surface level tools and APIs, which get changed frequently as a new iOS version comes out. But with graphics it’s actually the opposite — most large features come with new hardware, and because most of your customers are generally using older hardware, you can’t even use those new features until the majority of users have upgraded and support it (usually with a new console generation).

Regardless of what you think of the games industry, graphics programmers are highly in demand and paid relatively very well. It’s hard and there’s a lot of surface area to cover to really be excellent, but the knowledge is relevant, longstanding, and rewarding IMO.

[sph]

> Which kind of "graphics programmer" are you even going to be?

If one follows OP's advice, none at all.

> it is extremely fair to ward them off from the folly

I completely disagree with this. It is a damaging and unproductive attitude to teach beginners and young people. Who are you to say their future career prospect is a folly? The only thing that defines the talents of tomorrow is that they have ignored such advice and then pushed forward the state of the art in ways you couldn't even imagine. This is how progress works.

[bsder]

> Who are you to say their future career prospect is a folly?

Someone who watched an industry chew up and spit out far too many young people. That's who and that's why I'm qualified.

> The only thing that defines the talents of tomorrow is that they have ignored such advice and then pushed forward the state of the art in ways you couldn't even imagine. This is how progress works.

You would encourage an individual to walk a path that is 90%(95%/99%) likely to damage their life horribly in the name of "progress"? Really? That's ... more than a little inhumane.

Would you encourage someone who likes writing to be a "journalist" right now? I should hope not. I wouldn't tell them to not write, but I sure would try to find a better way to channel that skill.

Or perhaps, if we substituted "pro basketball player" for "graphics programming" perhaps you could see the folly? Although, at least the individual playing basketball would gain the immediate benefits of being quite fit while the graphics programmer would enjoy no such side benefit.

[sph]

> You would encourage an individual to walk a path that is 90%(95%/99%) likely to damage their life horribly in the name of "progress"

Are we still talking about graphics programming? Damage one’s life horribly, really? Those poor kids you saw ‘spat out’, are they irretrievably broken? You speak as if people are single-purpose machines, and that there is nothing to learn from adversity and challenge. That skills are not transferable and there is nothing new is there to be discovered.

Turning this around, would I discourage a kid from seriously pursuit a career as an astronaut or racing driver? That has a higher likelihood than most to ‘damage one’s life horribly’.

I honestly cannot understand nor subscribe to this pessimistic worldview, the one that would tell a kid to abandon their dream and go do what they believe society needs. Bollocks to that.

[StefanBatory]

Dreams are fun but they don't pay. And then you are earning scraps, and you realise that you'd prefer to be rich than to follow the dream for nothing.

I get that. In the time you'd learn about graphics programming, you could learn something else that would be able to give you a boost in the hiring market.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

What was that quote about chess... ?

Ah yes:

"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life" [1].

I'm not a graphics programmer so I'm not in a position to gatekeep but I fully agree with the sentiment in the OP (I mean KellyCriterion's post). Do you really want to dedicate your life to an industry that will chew you up and spit you out just to release a borken AAA game that will go down in review flames for ripping its players off?

Side projects, sure. But, professionally? There's gotta be better ways to pay the bacon and bring home the bills.

____________

[1] https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/favorite-chess-quot...

[KellyCriterion]

Dont forget funny "perks" like "crunch-time" and "pre-crunch-time" :-D

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Yeah. Luckily I learned about those things at my first year at university in a "Computer Science with games design" course. I switched to straight CS in year two and I've always thought I dodged a bullet, there.

Sad though. The most fun you can have with programming is maybe the least fun programming job of all.

[KellyCriterion]

Last sentence:

Quite true! Game Dev (and Graphics Programming) should be fun - though in todays environments, its everything apart from fun.

Honestly: For me today, writing boring business/workflow/CRUD/shop applications is the fun I should have had when being in GFX-programming - I do not know why its not fun to work for a game dev company.

[zerr]

Isn't it mostly shaders programming nowadays?

[yunnpp]

Modern APIs make synchronization and resource management a lot more complex. Used correctly they result in better performance; used incorrectly...

That being said, "nowadays" most studios just throw shit at UE5 and get it over with. It's obvious from how terrible many games run that they don't have a rendering engineer on the payroll.

[fastball]

"These annoying, jaded horse-drawn cart builders, cautioning youngsters from getting into the field in 1908."

[howLongHowLong]

If that jaded horse-cart builder worked at Studebaker (or Peugot or Durant-Dort which became General Motors) it would be bad advice, bc they turned into a car company. Many cart companies did, bc the people with the knowledge of suspensions, etc developed those skills in cart making

[imtringued]

Except the point of the jaded person is that building transportation vehicles is a bad industry to get into, because there is a massive switch from cart building to automobile and truck building on the basis that it has become impossible to build a full automobile as a single person.

[fastball]

"Graphics programming" is definitely not equivalent in scope (in the analogy) to "the entire transportation vehicle industry".

[fasterik]

Computer graphics is intrinsically interesting and rewarding. It sits at the intersection of several important fields, from computer science to mathematics to theoretical physics to low-level programming.

Maybe steering away from it is good advice for someone who's looking for a career transition but doesn't care about what they're actually doing. But that's not a good way to go through life; my advice to such a person would be to follow what they find interesting and valuable, and constantly challenge themselves to learn new things. Then deciding whether or not to learn computer graphics is relatively straightforward and it will be a net positive for the right kind of person. Even if they don't make it a career, the skills transfer well to many other areas.

[bsenftner]

Graphics programming has this one very, very useful aspect, exponentially more valuable today: the matrix algebra pipelines, and then the requirement to 'think in matrix transforms' is a wonderful and visually engaging way to get your foundation for machine learning math.

[eichin]

I don't really see this with modern graphics programming, but I was highly amused that my 1980s-1990s graphics skills (in particular, coordinate transform math) were very useful when I started working in robotics in the 2010s-2020s (because forward and inverse kinematics are exactly the same thing as 2d/3d projections.)

The trick there is that they both have related physical analogs, and machine learning math doesn't really (in that while you can visualize them spatially, it doesn't seem to help solve any problems in that space.)

[mathisfun123]

This is like saying being a cashier prepares you for a job in high-finance because both involve arithmetic on dollars and cents.

I've been in ML for ~5 years in multiple FAANGs and I have never seen a rotation matrix.

[bsenftner]

A rotation matrix is but one of dozens and dozens of different types of basic transforms. It gets really fun with jacobian 12x12 matrix operations, and free form deformations. Which maps to ML far better than most imagine.

[jplusequalt]

TBF, I bet any graphics programmer would be a boon for a ML shop for their GPU/performance optimization knowledge alone.

[bsenftner]

One of the largest, uncomprehendingly huge, omissions in AI video models is the lack of anyone from film, film production, animation, 3D graphics, or VFX on their video AI teams. Why would that be needed? Well, so the freaking models understand when anyone from any of these backgrounds prompts them with their industry standard language and terminology to describe a set, a camera move, an type of environmental lights, or any of the thousands of production terms used globally for the creation of media. The latest models are just now starting to understand basic terms, but describing a sequence with a motion camera moving for a narrative reason with action and dialogue in front is like describing calculus to a toddler. That's not to mention how much optimization knowledge anyone from a digital production developer background brings to the table...

[KellyCriterion]

AFAIR, the guys at DeepSeek with their PTX-assembly approach didnt have any graphics programming experience

[cognoboffin]

Doesn’t RoPE use 2D rotation matrices ?

[mathisfun123]

congrats you've found literally the only example ("the exception that proves the rule").

[bsenftner]

Your fixation on the rotation matrix == 3D graphics is not right

[cognoboffin]

SVD, and PCA are also examples.

[mathisfun123]

there is absolutely no sense in which the SVD/PCA decomposition is just a rotation matrix. you should probably review your linear algebra textbook (hint: scaling is extremely important).

[srean]

... and I have been both situations for longer and have seen tons and tons of them (*)... So?

Not so hypotheticals -- Heck the inputs that you want labelled could be rotation matrices. The desired output could be a rotation matrix. Generating more convenient features could be via a rotation matrix. Dimensionality reduction could be through a reduction matrix. Sparsity could be encouraged by proper use of rotation matrices. Shows up if you want to build in group theoretic invariance in your predictive model.

(*) If you consider Householders then even more

[kilpikaarna]

I mainly learned linear algebra via hands-on 3D graphics, and have a hard time thinking about a matrix as anything other than 4x4 and representing a linear transform...

How much do you even think about explicit matrix math when doing high-level ML?

[bsenftner]

3D graphics is so much more than the basic transforms. Add in all the deformation systems blending together, and those often being physics driven off the animation. You all have seen modern VFX, right? That is not basic 4x4 transforms.

[skydhash]

I’ve not done high level ML, but I’ve done introductory ML and the truth is while the input space and the output space can have N and M dimensions, there’s not a lot of constraints involved. The matrix there are more randoms.

The whole ML field is basically about starting from random points and trying to find useful shapes and constraints. Basically like trying to get object likeness in clouds

[rustystump]

5y multiple fang? Dont you know it is MANGOs now and has been for a while. Are you sure it is FAANGs?

[pascahousut]

Is the linear algebra of machine learning more complicated than that of graphics?

[dahart]

Both are large fields with many varied applications of linear algebra (and non-linear math too), and many people trying a lot of interesting & complicated ideas. The question is way too vague to answer meaningfully, it depends on what you mean by ‘graphics’ and by ‘machine learning’ and by ‘linear algebra’ and by ‘more complicated’. ;)

The linear algebra used in the basic raster pipeline to manage drawing a 3d unshaded mesh is pretty simple, and you can get by knowing just a little bit of linear algebra, like dot products and how to multiply matrices, and maybe what homogeneous coordinates are. But that is by no means the extent of linear algebra in all of graphics.

The linear algebra used in a basic neural network is also pretty simple, and you can get by knowing dot products and matrix multiply if you’re writing your own inference, and maybe just a tiny bit of derivative calculus if you’re writing your own backprop, but otherwise you don’t need anything else.

Students in both fields have to learn some basic linear algebra, but most people working in ML & graphics generally don’t use any linear algebra day to day, because most people aren’t writing inference/backprop and most people aren’t writing the graphics pipeline.

BTW, matrices and linear algebra are pure convenience for neural networks, and maybe for the graphics raster pipeline too. You can do both of these things without using matrices per se (though you might re-invent something equivalent and/or less efficient by avoiding matrices).

[ekholm_e]

I'm a data scientist and not a graphics programmer, but my guess is that it's just abstracted away more. If you're using ML/DL libraries, you're mostly just calling APIs that handle the linear algebra and calculus for you. Unless you're actively contributing to those libraries, you likely don't ever need to "touch" any of the underlying operations. Up to a point, it's useful to understand how things work under the hood, but where that point is kinda depends on your job. For instance, I could write code to do 'naive' matrix multiplication, but I couldn't, like, contribute to BLAS.

[molybd3num]

i think so

[Profan]

How about people like Inigo Quilez? I'd say they're still quite high profile in today's landscape. And the main thing is I think there's just way more people in the field overall today too, not everyone can be famous! It's totally fine to not be as high profile as literally one of the most well known people in a field, it's fine to just do it because you enjoy it! The math and art of graphics (and games in general) programming is beautiful in and of itself.

[nicebyte]

Ridiculous justification.

"Where is todays Jon Carmack?"

Where is the "John Carmack" of ML? Where is the John Carmack of physics? This hero worship crap needs to be left in the past. There isn't a singular active researcher you can point to and say "this person has made the field what it is today". There are very influential papers, but they all have multiple contributors. Is that really a valid reason to not engage in a particular area of research or engineering?

And who cares anyway? No matter what you choose to do with your time, chances are that you will not have that much of an impact on your chosen discipline. You should choose how to spend your time based on whether an activity genuinely interests you, not on whether you think it would be easy to get recognition.

[OkayPhysicist]

Physics is a weird one to bring up, because even compared to other fields, it's one where breakthroughs are frequently the result of relatively singular genius. Newton, Faraday, Planck, Einstein, their discoveries were generally not incremental progress along existing lines of inquiry like most physics research is, they made pretty radical changes to our understanding of the world writ large.

In comparison, Carmack is grossly overhyped. He's like the Feynman of CS: A significant contributor to relatively young field, and a pretty influential communicator, but their contributions were moreso being the first to make a certain type of incremental progress than a paradigm shift.

[nicebyte]

No, that is exactly the reason I am bringing up physics. There used to be a time when a singular person could make an outsized impact. In the recent past though, this has not been the case: significant breakthroughs are usually the result of coordinated effort of many individuals. Is that really a valid reason to not do physics?

[nicebyte]

now, if you said "don't get into it because your primary employment prospects would be games or film industry, which are known to be less than stellar towards their workers" - that would be a different story.

[ossgamesnoexist]

> "Where is todays Jon Carmack?"

Where are today's games with sufficient insight on their technical aspects, to the level we got with Commander Keen, Wolfenstein and Doom?

Dwarf Fortress solved some outstanding lag issues involving tracking owned objects. But if you ask a random person HOW, we don't actually have a serious clue.

Think of well known instances of big developers having their code exposed and we have... I dunno, Valve's TF2 leak and their incredibly rare Dota 2 between the lanes posts?

There is no John Carmack now. You're saying its because there's no large space to improve on like how early people had to. I say it's not because the struggles and unique problems disappeared, but because there isn't a benefit to that type of transparency anymore.

[hoistthesales]

JC was a bit of an anomaly but also his image is mostly coming from players and journalists. Developers struggled to use the later id software engines (partly why UE won that war).

You don’t need to be JC to earn a decent living as a graphics/game programmer.

[cjk]

Couldn't disagree more. I've only recently started digging into graphics programming and I've found it incredibly rewarding. It's the _one_ area of expertise that I don't yet have that has been preventing me from solo-developing a 3D game engine.

It takes five minutes of trawling through the videos on the GDC Vault to see all of the clever and interesting ways modern graphics engineers are eking every bit of performance out of modern hardware. Is it as clever or innovative as Carmack's fast inverse square root? I don't know. I'm not sure how to compare those things. But there is still plenty of room for that flavor of work for those that are interested.

[bsenftner]

Well, then: "merry Christmas" so to say: https://flipcode.com/archives/

[KellyCriterion]

Ha! Didnt now its still online!

It was THE ressource back then! :-)

[cjk]

This is brilliant. Thanks!

[qingcharles]

Right. Most of the clever stuff that Carmack is famous for moved from software into hardware.

By argument about not getting into graphics programming is different -- are 3D engines, with their vertices and textures, going to even exist a few years from now? Or will everything be rendered directly by an AI world model? How much code will a game contain, or will it simply exist in a series of cleverly-worded prompts?

[groundzeros2015]

There is more to graphics than AAA games or blockbuster movies.

[dylan604]

> "Where is todays Jon Carmack?" - he was famous for squeezing everything out of the hardware,

Spinning that another way, there's Bill Gates (not sure of the authenticity though) saying something along the lines of why would he pay to spend that kind of time when CPUs/RAM/HDDs are getting faster/cheaper; users can just upgrade. If we determine which method is more successful based on their worth...

[skotobaza]

> users can just upgrade

That used to work, but not anymore. Not because of hardware prices, but because of small gains that upgrading gets us nowadays.

[markus_zhang]

What if I just want to program some rendering engine for a game that looks like DOOM 3 and its predecessors? I think that’s still quite doable?

[corysama]

Old 3D engine guy here. I highly encourage folks to make a 3D engine for fun and learning. Shipping a game with it would be a cherry on top. Come join us in r/graphicsprograming, r/gameenginedevs and the graphics programming discord.

[markus_zhang]

Thanks. I have 3 days of vacation ahead so will use the time to sort out the math first. Code shouldn’t be too hard for a very simple 3d demo.

I tried my hand on hand a while ago and found out I couldn’t make out how many pixels to draw, say, a line in the 3d world. It involves a transformation to the world and another transformation to the camera, so I couldn’t make it out without any study.

This is probably very trivial so hopefully 3 days is good enough.

[corysama]

I recommend https://gamemath.com/book/ as a good starting point.

[markus_zhang]

Thanks a bunch. I purchased a book "Mathematics for 3D game programming & computer graphics" so figured they are pretty similar. But it is still very good material so I'll take it as reference.

[shermantanktop]

Seems like a lot of people work for a long time perfecting their special flavor of ice cream and never quite get to the cherry on top.

A lot to be learned from building a 3D engine, no doubt, but anecdotally the chances that it will lead a working game that anyone wants to play seem low. That's not a bad thing, unless they tell themselves they are going to ship a game any day now, just as soon as they do X, then Y, then Z, ...

[jayd16]

You can still read a bunch of papers and be first to market using exotic tech. The main issue right now is that games are so incredibly high budget and the bar is so high that you really need to stand out in many ways.

We see folks posting photo real, Gaussian splat FPS maps here every now and then but without also innovating on gameplay its just a tech demo. Those don't cut it these days.

[psygn89]

I think the people that go into this field today (and for a while now) probably do it for the love of it, not the pay or widespread fame of doing something extraordinary in the field. Not that you can't have it all, but not being some legend I, well, I think that's a strange reason for someone already interested in game dev not to step into the field?

[halestock]

Huh? Just because you're not going to become the next graphics programming legend you think it's not worth getting into graphics programming at all?

[ragnese]

That's not a charitable reading of their comment. Granted, I also don't think articulated their point very well with that example. I can't speak for the commenter, and I'm genuinely not sure about the point they were attempting to make. But, I think the point was more so that things are moving so fast in the field that it's basically impossible to become the level of expert that has a truly deep understanding of all the parts and layers.

If you're an expert as a particular programming language, for example, you may have a good mental model for what optimizations the compiler and/or runtime are able to do, and the way you write code in that language may be influenced by that deep knowledge. You may have written so much code in that language that you know all of the corner cases and foot-guns, and how to deal with them--or better yet, how to avoid them in the first place. You may even develop new/uncommon patterns or idioms that other people end up adopting.

But, if that programming language totally changes its own semantics and compiler toolchain every few months, nobody would have time to build deep intuition and expertise like that.

I think that was the point.

[JasonSage]

It's also a great way to not become the next "graphics programming legend" --I think a fast-moving field with lots of new developments is actually an exciting place to be a pro.

[alexashka]

The moment you realize most people's thinking is no better than a hallucinating LLM :)

[lp4v4n]

Very interesting insights, thanks for this.

Indeed "be a graphics programmer" nowadays sounds like "be an assembly programmer".

A kind of time waster for a nerd with too much time in their hands.

[jzer0cool]

Any insights? If not traditional Computer Graphics due to change, where might be the good to spend your attention within the field. Or is OP saying to stay away?

[anthk]

Fabrice Bellard.

[redlewel]

Boooooooo

Keep learning yung ones