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Finding your home in game graphics programming

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Re: Finding your home in game graphics programming

#31

Post by t8y »

nopenopenopeno wrote: post #7
Danieru wrote: post #2

Indeed the author has caught on that graphics is now much wider. Yet his post still focuses on the APIs. A bias he admits to. APIs are the easy part of graphics programming. Now perhaps I say that out of bias, as I focus on shaders and artist work pipelines. The author focuses on APIs and thus reached for a simpler API as a teaching on ramp, while I would new learners run the other way and learn the basics of blender…

I learned unity about 5 years ago and got burnt out on it after a few personal projects and a few freelance side gigs I took that used it. But I was not a decent programmer then and I have earned a CS degree in the time since. I actually used 3DS Max and Blender more than Unity but have since been distracted with web development and once I’m settled in my new job I am planning to write a raytracer. Any other recommen…

The book RayTracingInOneWeekend[1] is a good starting point for people looking to write a raytracer.

[1]https://raytracing.github.io/books/RayTracingInOneWeekend.ht...

Re: Finding your home in game graphics programming

#32

Post by Waterluvian »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #30
Waterluvian wrote: post #14

Kind of a weird New Years fever dream tangent. Bear with me: Say we have a scene to render and a frame can be rendered in 10ms given the chosen game engine or graphics API or whatnot. There is a hypothetical optimum code for rendering that scene that can do it in less time. And the delta between those times is the price you pay for API abstractions, human abstractions (eg. maintainable code vs clever code), and other…

Gonna take a wild guess, Cities Skylines? I upgraded from a 1600x/GTX1060 system to a 10th-gen-i7/RTX 2080 system and I still can't get higher than 35fps. A city with 3k citizens and a city with 100k citizens may run at 35fps and 32fps respectively. Though I can run it with supersampling at 250% now and my GPU still doesn't bottleneck it (300% supersampling is what finally cracks my fps, jumping from 30 -ish to 5). I…

Pillars of Eternity 2.

The ignorant part of me wants to scream, “it’s a mostly 2D game with almost no calculations being made!” But of course I don’t know what’s actually going on behind the scenes.

Re: Finding your home in game graphics programming

#33

Post by t8y »

Danieru wrote: post #2

Indeed the author has caught on that graphics is now much wider. Yet his post still focuses on the APIs. A bias he admits to. APIs are the easy part of graphics programming. Now perhaps I say that out of bias, as I focus on shaders and artist work pipelines. The author focuses on APIs and thus reached for a simpler API as a teaching on ramp, while I would new learners run the other way and learn the basics of blender…

IMO the article is better advice than the parent comment.

Learning from Unreal or even Godot to write a basic renderer is pretty wild. It would be like telling someone who wants to make a model rocket that they should study the Falcon Heavy.

Making a basic renderer in c++ is orders of magnitude simpler then trying to deconstruct a game engine that(according to google search) has over 2million lines of code.

Re: Finding your home in game graphics programming

#34

Post by squeaky-clean »

Waterluvian wrote: post #32
squeaky-clean wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gonna take a wild guess, Cities Skylines? I upgraded from a 1600x/GTX1060 system to a 10th-gen-i7/RTX 2080 system and I still can't get higher than 35fps. A city with 3k citizens and a city with 100k citizens may run at 35fps and 32fps respectively. Though I can run it with supersampling at 250% now and my GPU still doesn't bottleneck it (300% supersampling is what finally cracks my fps, jumping from 30 -ish to 5). I…

Pillars of Eternity 2. The ignorant part of me wants to scream, “it’s a mostly 2D game with almost no calculations being made!” But of course I don’t know what’s actually going on behind the scenes.

Oh wow. Never played it myself, but some friends do so I've seen a bit of the game. Given the genre and graphics I would definitely not expect it to have such poor performance!

Re: Finding your home in game graphics programming

#35

Post by throwawaysea »

Danieru wrote: post #2

Indeed the author has caught on that graphics is now much wider. Yet his post still focuses on the APIs. A bias he admits to. APIs are the easy part of graphics programming. Now perhaps I say that out of bias, as I focus on shaders and artist work pipelines. The author focuses on APIs and thus reached for a simpler API as a teaching on ramp, while I would new learners run the other way and learn the basics of blender…

> APIs are the easy part of graphics programming. Now perhaps I say that out of bias, as I focus on shaders and artist work pipelines. The author focuses on APIs and thus reached for a simpler API as a teaching on ramp, while I would new learners run the other way and learn the basics of blender.

Is there some sort of taxonomy of graphics programming that lays out these different areas of work? Are they recognized or common specializations or is each practitioner’s situation unique and circumstantial?

Re: Finding your home in game graphics programming

#36

Post by captaincrowbar »

Waterluvian wrote: post #14

Kind of a weird New Years fever dream tangent. Bear with me: Say we have a scene to render and a frame can be rendered in 10ms given the chosen game engine or graphics API or whatnot. There is a hypothetical optimum code for rendering that scene that can do it in less time. And the delta between those times is the price you pay for API abstractions, human abstractions (eg. maintainable code vs clever code), and other…

The term you're looking for might be "abstraction penalty".

For tools that can identify where the bottlenecks are, I recommend watching Emery Berger's talk "Performance Matters" from CppCon 2020 (either of the two links below should work). He introduces some innovative new profiling tools for this sort of analysis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koTf7u0v41o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzyhpbrC2Bs

Re: Finding your home in game graphics programming

#39

Post by ginko »

ridiculousthrow wrote: post #15

Graphics Programming needs to be restructured. There’s a lot of focus on API driven learning. Vulkan, D3D12, 11, etc. Wrong approach. Learn fundamentals of what the hardware is capable of. For each feature, write down a few ideas of how you could use it by itself. Write down a few ideas of how you could combine it with other features. Think of “I want to do X. What features can allow me to do that?” The APIs, althoug…

>The APIs, although they are not easily interchangeable, use the same hardware and can often do the same things with a bit of effort.

Actually it's the other way round. GPU architectures can vary wildly especially when you include mobile GPUs which are tiling architectures. Graphics APIs are the least common denominator interface that makes targeting all of them possible.

Re: Finding your home in game graphics programming

#40

Post by pixelpoet »

So many words and not one single mention of ray tracing, that's pretty disappointing.

As someone who's spent basically their entire career in offline rendering, it never fails to surprise me how many people think that using someone else's API is the alpha and the omega of GP.

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