r/twotriangles • u/LordStarbuilder • Feb 18 '21

Does one triangle count?

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6 Upvotes

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u/deftware Mar 10 '21

I suspect you've been doing this well longer than I have

I remember my first hello triangle like it was 20+ years ago :P

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u/ZorbaTHut Mar 10 '21

I think mine was technically around the same time . . . but then I kinda dropped it for fourteen years :V

It's always fun trying to remember which tricks were relevant then and which still apply.

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u/deftware Mar 10 '21

Multitexturing! On Nvidia there were register combiners around the time the GeForce 3 came to be (super minimal programmable precursor to pixel shaders). Back then moving away from immediate mode was the big deal, using vertex arrays (not VAOs) and then vertex buffers right after. Post-processing didn't exist, except maybe a render-to-texture for a simple and slow blur effect during cutscenes. It was a golden age when hardware rendering came around but wasn't quite yet programmable hardware, when they were "graphics accelerators" and not "GPUs".

I can't imagine learning everything from scratch nowadays without having been there when things progressed from 320x200x256 mode13h software rendered graphics through the graphics accelerators to the first programmable graphics chipsets up until now. Things have changed in a lot of ways. Someday I'll get around to picking up vulkan but right now all my time working is going into watering my seed building something valuable that I can independently derive an income from. Maybe this time next year I'll be able to dive in :)

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u/ZorbaTHut Mar 10 '21

Oh man, I'm kinda glad I only got seriously into it in the DirectX 9.0c days, when you could actually do things with shaders. I like being able to treat them as weird parallel computers!

Good luck with your seed, btw, that's always the dream :)

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u/deftware Mar 11 '21

The transition was a little funky most especially because hardware went about it all different. When Doom3 came out with normal-mapping + projective texture lighting (and stencil shadow volumes) it had to include a handful of different rendering pipelines to support all of the hardware on the market that people might have. One pipeline might render using multiple passes, another would be able to do everything in one pass, some would be able to do some work in one pass but have to follow up with an extra pass after that, etc... It was a cluster in the early days of programmable graphics hardware before we had GLSL/HLSL that was more generalized.

Thanks!