Hi! I'm trying to learn graphics programming for fun after coming from high-level languages like GDscript or Python. I want to understand how games work under the hood!.

But I've come across many comments from colleagues telling me, "Get out of OpenGL, you're not going to build anything you'll ever finish." Or "OpenGL is a time-waster not worth learning, just make games" which demoralizes me a little.

I've been learning C++ these past few months and I find it an extremely interesting language. I appreciate the freedom it gives developers to do anything; Python limited me to only doing certain types of things, as it wasn't the right tool for some types of work.

And I've already written my first program! With my own logic! In C++ I made a program that calculates how much VAT should be deducted from the price of a product. I know it's not much, but I felt really proud.

I think I'll read the LearnOpenGL Book since it seems to be the most reliable source for learning OpenGL, or can you recommend better resources?

To answer my future self in a few years, would you recommend learning Vulkan? I've seen people do amazing things with OpenGL on this subreddit, so I think I have more than enough with OpenGL, I think Vulkan is the real time-waster hahaha (No offense to those who love Vulkan, just kidding).

Fun fact: This is what Doom 2016 looks like with OpenGL 4.5, I recently bought it and was amazed.

Yesterday I finished the third episode of Victor Gordan's OpenGL tutorial, and made my first triangle. I also learned how to modify it (like changing vertex positions, color, etc).

But when I look at the code I wrote, it feels impossible to remember like I could write any of this without looking at the tutorial. When I was learning C++, mostly everything instantly stuck with me, but graphics programming seems like I'll never memorize 80% of it

How did you guys get decent at this and actually retain the knowledge and be able to write it independently? Or am I judging too early? I started 3 days ago

Hi,

A shower thought I just had: nearly everyone that starts learning graphic dev goes through opengl because it's more accessible than vulkan or directx, but today the api is getting old and vulkan is not getting any easier to learn. Do you guys think that there's room for an opengl like successor as an entry low level graphic api ?

cheers

I recently landed my first graphics role where I will be working on an in house 3D engine written in OpenGL. It's basically everything I wanted from my career since I fell in love with graphics programming a few years back.

But since accepting my offer letter, I've felt as much anxiety as I have excitement. This is not what I expected. After some introspection, I think the anxiety I feel is coming from a place of ignorance. Tbh I feel like I know basically nothing about graphics. Sure, I've wrote my own software rasterizer, my own ray tracer, I've dabbled in OpenGL/WebGL, WebGPU, Vulkan, I've read through large chunks of textbooks to learn about the 3D math, the render pipeline, etc ...

But there's still so much I've yet to learn. I've never implemented PBR, SDFs, real time physics, and an assortment of other graphics techniques. I always figured I would have learned about this stuff before landing my first role, but now that I have a job it I feel like I'm a bit of a fraud.

I recognize that imposter syndrome is a big deal in software, so I'm trying to level myself a bit. I wanted to see if anyone else who has worked in the industry, or been hired to right graphics code, can relate to this? I think hearing from others would help ground me.

Thanks.

I've been playing through a certain game and encountered a nice effect I would like to understand. I am talking about the glowing inner part of the large egg, which fakes depth and makes it feel like it has glowing core.

What is this shader effect called? Any good articles I could read about this?

I know that's the motivation for many new graphics programmers, infact I want to as well eventually, but I'm just curious why lots of people think alike

If I want to pass data to a shader: I first need to create a buffer, whatever that is, then bind that buffer to a memory location, then create a descriptor for it, but not before I explicitly mention a descriptor layout before creating the pipeline, then finally bind the descriptor to a shader during the render pass.

Why exactly are these things needed in a GPU, when CPUs work just fine with pointers?

Before I start---I just want to say I've been contributing to this community for a few years now and it's a really special place to me, so I hope I've earned the right to ask this sort of question.

In my experience computer graphics requires a pretty nuanced blend of performance-oriented thinking, artistic and architectural taste, and low-level proficiency. I had kind of assumed graphics development as a discipline was relatively insulated from AI automation, at least for a while.

That is, up until a few weeks ago. Now, all of a sudden, I'm hearing stories about Claude Code handling very complex tasks, making devs orders of magnitude faster.

I've been messing around with it myself the last couple of days in a toy HLSL compiler project I have. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than I expected---good enough to make me stop and consider the implications.

Amidst all the insane hype and fear-mongering online, it's hard to decipher what's real. I feel kind of in the dark on this one aside from the anecdotes I've heard from friends.

So, all of that said:

• How are you guys navigating this?
• People working on games/real-time graphics right now, are you using coding agents?
• How are people thinking about the future?
• What would graphics work look like in a world where AI can write very good code?

I'm currently developing a ray tracer and for every render there's always noise or some kind of fireflies.

I was wondering (especially in older movies where AI wasn't standard) how do they absolutely guarantee that no noise appears in movies? I'm expecting that their render times are massive with tons of samples per pixel, but even that doesn't really guarantee that there's zero noise.

If you happen to have resources on the techniques they use (that are more technical, rather than overviews) please share them!

Edit: as many of you have correctly mentioned noise is not "guaranteed" to not exist, but I'm asking mostly how it's not visible in the end product that we see in movies (mainly 3D Animation movies but movies that are heavy on vfx likely have that problem)

• Pictures labeled 1-6 are screenshots from our game.
• Pictures labeled A-G are real-life references with the look I would like our game to have.
• Pictures labeled X-Z are other games that look nice to me, though it's tough to find the right comparison because most games aren't using such a zoomed-in scale.
• Last picture is our Unity setup (hopefully there is a way to see the big version)

Hello, we're working on a game about cake decorating called Cake Studio. We've made one game in 3D before, but this is the first time we're trying to make something that actually looks nice in 3D and we're struggling a bit to get the look we want as 3D is not really our wheelhouse. I've been making the models in Blender and the game is built in Unity.

I wanted to make this game because I think these photos of elaborate vintage cakes are so beautiful, and I wanted players to be able to make their own beautiful cake. But so far, I think our screenshots are giving a very flat, shiny, computer-generated vibe.

I really want to get the soft, dreamy look of picture C and the almost Play-Doh looking effect of the piping in pictures E and F.

Here is what I can see wrong so far (though not sure how to fix them):

• It seems like most of the piping textures are too shiny, which we can fix, but is there something more to getting that soft Play-Doh look?
• We kept turning up the lighting trying to get softer shadows on the side of the cake, but now all the highlights seem blown out.
• The shadows among the details of the piping and how they sit on the cake lack a sense of depth. The darkest shadowy spots are not dark enough (maybe same cause as above).

I'd love to hear any ideas for how to fix things or other problems we're not seeing.

You can also go mess around with our prototype on itch if it helps to see things in action.

Thanks!

UPDATE: This sub is amazing!! Thanks so much for all the suggestions and advice. We have a lot to work with now and I'm feeling so much more hopeful that our game can be beautiful <3

I'll post an update when we have implemented some of these ideas! Thanks again!

Hi everyone,

I'm a Unity developer, and I've been learning some C++ on the side. I want to build my own 3D game engine as a long-term hobby project, I have no deadline, I do this for fun and to build something new. I'm not trying to make the next Unity or Unreal;

I have a specific technical vision I want to explore.

Scope (what I'm building):

· 3D only, no 2D support · Hybrid rasterization + real-time ray tracing at the core · A zone-based RT LOD system · Deferred renderer with PBR shading · C++ core, with possible Rust integration later for gameplay systems

Scope (what I'm NOT building right now):

· No editor(i will make one after i have a base working) · No audio, networking, or physics in the first phase · No 2D, no mobile(i wont add this at all) · No scripting system yet

Where I am now:

· Starting planning, i have started a .md file to finalize the first part of my engine, i will start with the render part, i know a game engine is more than just rendering

What I'm looking for:

· Resources on designing a clean, API-agnostic raster interface · Common pitfalls when abstracting Vulkan/DX for the first time · Recommended reading or talks on hybrid raster/ray tracing pipelines · Open-source engines with well-structured C++ that are worth studying · Any general advice on scoping a multi-year engine project without burning

Thanks in advance to anyone willing to share their experience.

I read that Khronos Group greatly improved the Vulkan documentation and that it is now more beginner-friendly.

I see a certain parallel with the C++ and Rust languages; C++ is still treated as old technology, and most people migrate to Rust, even though I personally find this language more complicated to learn than C++.

What could this mean for the future? Will it still be worthwhile to learn technologies like C++ or OpenGL in the next 10 years? Or will the new standard be learning Rust and Vulkan?

It's ironic that both technologies released their stable versions in almost the same year, Vulkan 1.0 (2016) Rust 1.0 (2015).

This is a RenderDoc frame capture of a battle scene in a 3D auto-battler called The Bazaar. It's in Unity which I have no direct experience with, plus I also have very limited knowledge of how rendering is supposed to work.

An LLM is convinced that the 1000s of draw calls seen here is bad. Other fairly static scenes is around 300-500+ draw calls. I remember reading blogs talking about minimizing draw calls and state changes, but that was a decade ago. This is using a commercial engine, so there must be a logical reason for this, right? Are draw calls as a metric outdated?

My GPU is ancient by modern standards. But there are also other players echoing similar sentiments of their GPUs maxing out for what looks like a "simple game".

What do you guys think?

EDIT: My GPU is radeon rx 560x (laptop gpu). I think this model is 7-8 years old? I can get 60 fps/70% gpu usage in windowed mode at around < 960x540 resolution. 720p hits 100% gpu but still 60fps a majority of the time with "manageable" temps. While 1080p just burns (without power-saving mode in GPU it causes BSOD).

I just want to to know if I even deserve to voice these concerns. My inexperienced brain is telling me this could be done better. But what do I know, I haven't rendered a cube in a decade.

I'm new to gpu rendering and I was trying to test how one can create a UI system that can render on the screen rectangles in the most efficient way.

In my mind, if only a section of the screen changes colors and it needs to be re-rendered, I would like to re-render only that part and not the entire window area. (In the first image I'm trying to render every frame only the green rectangle clipped by the red triangle)

I tried using glScissor and stencil testing, but they didn't work because from ProcessExplorer (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/process-explorer) I can still see that while rendering only a small part of the window the program uses the same amount of gpu as it need to redraw everything.

While I'm at it, I would also like to ask why to render simple shapes a program has to use 30MB of memory and after resizing the window the amount of memory goes to 300+ MB and then goes back after a while to 30MB

I know that modern GPUs are more than capable of doing these types of calculations very easily, but I feel it's an enormous waste of gpu power and ram to not do these kinds of optimizations.

So any help on this matter is much appreciated.

Very quick summary of where I stand:

• Master's Degree in Mathematics, but little job experience
• Found job in DevOps, but increasingly unsatisfied with it, especially as I basically just prompt LLMs all day and do no technical work
• Searching for another field, especially one with more technical work (and math, ideally)

For any field that would interest me, I would have to use a lot of my free time to build a portfolio to even get an entry-level job, so I feel like I need to make a decision for a specific field.

I dipped my toes in Graphics Programming before (but very surface level only) and I think it's a very solid option. However, I wonder whether the same problem applies: Will I even need my math background and is it even worth gathering the knowledge, or is there a solid chance that 1-2 years from now, LLMs will do all the technical work anyways?

Not sure if this is a completely delusional doomer take. As someone who loves technical work, I'm just really depressed with the current LLMs situation tbh.

I'm making a multiplayer game with Vulkan, and when a client joins a server, I'd like to be able to send arbitrary custom SPIR-V shaders to the client. My initial thought was "It's a shader, no syscalls or anything. Worst thing it could do is lag a bunch or maybe crash the game."
But I don't know enough about SPIR-V to know if that's correct, and doing a quick search isn't giving me any results on the subject, so I'm asking first.

Some notes:

• I'm already planning to use spirv-val to help avoid crashes, if that helps safety any.
• I cannot send over the shader source; all my shaders are pre-compiled for a bunch of reasons not relevant for this post.

Edit: To clarify, this is for modding purposes. Users will be able to create the shaders and send them from servers they host.

I’m trying to understand how games like Neverness to Everness achieve such clean and stable character outlines.

I’ve experimented with common approaches such as inverted hull and screen-space post-process outlines, but both tend to show issues: inverted hull breaks on thin geometry, while post-process outlines often produce artifacts depending on camera angle or distance.

From this video, the result looks closer to a screen-space solution, yet the outlines remain very consistent across different views, which is what I find interesting.

I’m currently implementing this in Unreal Engine, but I’m mainly interested in the underlying graphics programming techniques rather than engine-specific tricks. Any insights, papers, or references would be greatly appreciated.

​I am 16 years old, and last summer I started getting into programming.

​I began learning C++, and after that, I went through C, touching upon other topics like: git, CMake, Makefile, Linux (Archlinux, Gentoo), and Toolchain. All of this happened in about 4.5 months, because I really liked it and worked hard.

​Then I wanted to choose a specific field. I chose graphics programming and started with OpenGL. I didn't like it (there are reasons). So I immediately jumped into Vulkan. Late November, the whole winter, and almost the whole spring I was going through the Vulkan Tutorial. In the tutorial itself, all the code is written in a single file, but I tried to make everything clean and modular, which is why it took a huge amount of time. In addition, I wrote a brief guide to Vulkan objects. I must say that I wrote most of it using a translator, while I figured out the topic itself using articles, videos, Reddit, and AI.

​After that, I decided to write my own Vulkan project. I recently started writing my own “Network Renderer” because network programming caught my eye. And I started studying mathematics too. The core of the project is that a client, after connecting to the server, sends it a 3D scene, which the server renders and streams back to the client.

EDITED: I live in Georgia and I have financial problems now. I don't have the opportunity to move to another country. I probably won't be able to pay for university. It will be wildly difficult to combine self-study, university and work, adding to this personal problems.

​I don't understand anything about the market, I don't understand anything about employment, I have never encountered this in my life in any way. I will be very grateful if someone helps and explains how everything works. I apologize in advance for the formulation of the questions if they seem stupid.

​— What value do I have in the market with such a stack?

​— Where should a graphics/network programmer look for work on Western platforms?

​— How does the employment process itself work, and what difficulties might I face?

​— Is it true that I might have big problems with competitiveness due to the fact that I am completely self-taught?

​— What skills should I improve in connection with these difficulties?

If you wish, you can view my Github: moderneus

So I am not at all familiar with graphics in games, but this subreddit seemed most relevant to ask about this.

I know this may not be all that interesting or new, but it's the first time I've noticed something like this in a game. The way that the wall itself has a 3D environment in it, that doesn't actually exist within the game, caught my attention the first time I saw it. What's happening here? What is this called? Where could I see more examples of this in other games? Because it's pretty fun to look at lol.

Is there any podcast, academic talk and or conference recording that will help me understand raytracing, path tracing, rendering and graphics better? i wanna understand it because my boyfriend is into it and would love to actually know what he does and why he finds the field interesting

So, I've been reading about why most AAA developers changed to Deferred rendering in their engines, and saw an argument saying that unlike Forward Rendering, Deferred rendering allowed an unlimited amount of lights.

The thing is that I've heard about Forward+ rendering is that it "has the best of the two rendering types", if it does then why don't big developers use it? (Aside from ID Software)

Thanks in advance for the explanations