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KellyCriterion 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
xboxnolifes 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
michaelchisari 1 hours ago [-]
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 59 minutes ago [-]
Out of curiosity, which fields would you say are the best to just be mediocre in?
michaelchisari 42 minutes ago [-]
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.
dakolli 10 minutes ago [-]
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.
sph 1 hours ago [-]
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’
readme 60 minutes ago [-]
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.
bashmelek 50 minutes ago [-]
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 45 minutes ago [-]
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
fastball 5 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
bsder 1 hours ago [-]
> 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?
sph 40 minutes ago [-]
> 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 4 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
bsenftner 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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.
kilpikaarna 2 hours ago [-]
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?
skydhash 2 hours ago [-]
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
cognoboffin 2 hours ago [-]
Doesn’t RoPE use 2D rotation matrices ?
mathisfun123 2 hours ago [-]
congrats you've found literally the only example ("the exception that proves the rule").
cognoboffin 2 hours ago [-]
SVD, and PCA are also examples.
mathisfun123 1 hours ago [-]
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).
cognoboffin 48 minutes ago [-]
SVD is the decomposition of a matrix into two rotation matrices and a scaling matrix, by definition:
i don't understand who is having trouble reading the dialogue here you or i;
> there is absolutely no sense in which the SVD/PCA decomposition is just a rotation matrix... (hint: scaling is extremely important)
...
> SVD is the decomposition of a matrix into two rotation matrices and a scaling matrix, by definition:
yes that's exactly what i was implying when i said SVD more than just rotation, scaling is also important.
my point, which is my same original point, is that if you think learning about rotation/euler matrices is going to prepare you in any way, shape, or form for ML (vis-a-vis SVD/PCA or RoPE or anything else) you're in for a very rude awakening.
pascahousut 3 hours ago [-]
Is the linear algebra of machine learning more complicated than that of graphics?
ekholm_e 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
i think so
srean 2 hours ago [-]
... 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
jplusequalt 3 hours ago [-]
TBF, I bet any graphics programmer would be a boon for a ML shop for their GPU/performance optimization knowledge alone.
cjk 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
nicebyte 3 minutes ago [-]
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 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.
Profan 2 hours ago [-]
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.
psygn89 2 hours ago [-]
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?
jayd16 2 hours ago [-]
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.
markus_zhang 3 hours ago [-]
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 1 hours ago [-]
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.
shermantanktop 15 minutes ago [-]
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, ...
halestock 3 hours ago [-]
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?
JasonSage 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
The moment you realize most people's thinking is no better than a hallucinating LLM :)
hoistthesales 3 hours ago [-]
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.
groundzeros2015 2 hours ago [-]
There is more to graphics than AAA games or blockbuster movies.
SoleilAbsolu 4 hours ago [-]
Somewhat surprising there is no mention of basic design principles, or understanding the quirks of human perception. My brother was a production artist for some well-known computer games in the '90s-'00s, and continually complained about programmers and managers with zero visual sense, or curiosity about understanding the artists' side.
Graphics aren't my specialty, but as a musician, sound designer and producer, by far the most effective/influential audio DSP coders I'm aware of understand the basics of music, the physics/acoustics of sounds, and the gotchas at the interface between discrete digital processes and how we perceive and interpret stimuli.
shikshake 4 hours ago [-]
There’s a separate role that is more along the lines of what you’re saying, called a Technical Artist (that’s what I do)
I think graphics programmers benefit from having an artistic mindset, but they usually work so low level that it isn’t necessary to be successful.
bsenftner 3 hours ago [-]
I was a technical artist for a series of feature films during the early '00s. At a good studio they'll have art and design classes for the tech origin staff and scripting and bash classes for the art origin staff. I was both, and that was a ton of fun.
gambiting 4 hours ago [-]
Exactly, Technical Artist is a distinct position that normally bridges the gap between pure programmers and artists and their needs. All TAs I've ever worked with had this incredible skill of knowing exactly what tech thing they need to achieve the outcome that the artists want.
tayo42 3 hours ago [-]
Is this a viable field for employment?or did it collapse like alot of other digital art?
harulf 1 hours ago [-]
Good Technical Artists are one of the most sought after professions in game dev. But it's also an annoyingly broad role that means different specific things at different places. The one common trait is being able to bridge the gap between art and code in a way that makes both parties happy.
thewebguyd 3 hours ago [-]
This applies outside of creative industries too. I've seen my fair share of B2B/enterprise software where its clear the vendor has no clue how the industry they are selling to works, or how the users of that software think.
AI changed the calculus a bit (or at least, it has the potential to) but I think that was a huge part of the whole "learn to code" movement in the mid 2000s, to start treating software development as a "feature, not a product" of existing experts in their field so that the people most familiar with their domain are actually the ones making the software instead of having to translate the requirements down to a dev team.
mghackerlady 3 hours ago [-]
the learn to code movement was a psyop by big tech to get more javascript monkeys for cheap
pipes 3 hours ago [-]
I doubt most JavaScript monkeys would have got through their leet code style interview process ! :)
elzbardico 3 hours ago [-]
Think more code monkeys for enterprise software consultancies, like Accenture, Tata, IBM Global Services, etc.
They needed warm bodies for their projects, as the usual source of manpower was grinding leetcode to work on bigtech at salaries that would make an accenture business type vomit in disgust.
Atrix256 2 hours ago [-]
(author of the article)
100% agree. As others have said, a good graphics programmer works with tech artists and artists. Frankly, graphics programming is largely a role of service to enable those people to do what they want to do, or help create what they envision.
People mentioned Inigo Quilez as an example of a graphics programmer who is also an artist. He is a power house and a unicorn.
I personally like playing music / programming audio more, which is a good ground for learning DSP things - useful when for instance, you want to push your rendering noise into the high frequencies, so a low pass filter is more effective at denoising.
milesvp 2 hours ago [-]
I see this all the time with audio too. The amount of bits you need to reserve a
I created and still maintain A-Frame (aframe.io). It’s been a gentle gateway to learn 3D graphics for a decade. Cool community if I can say so ha ha. Web is a great way to share stuff as you learn, collect feedback and get visibility. Many cases in the community of people that ended up doing 3d graphics professionally.
dapper_w0lf 37 minutes ago [-]
Wow, I wrote my master's thesis using A-Frame!
Honestly, I'd love to give you my deepest gratitude for what you did with A-frame. I wasn't a programmer at the time and had very little experience but A-Frame helped me realise my idea in a really intuitive way. I occasionally look back at the repo and cringe from how bad my code was back then but if it wasn't for that project I doubt I would be where I am today.
Thank you.
dmarcos 9 minutes ago [-]
Thanks so much! Really happy to hear. It makes all sweat, blood and tears of open source maintenance worth it.
utopiah 2 hours ago [-]
Can definitely recommend it!
Start with just <a-box> and <a-sky>, add some animations, then add some community components if it's not enough. Still not enough then modify via ThreeJS, all the way to shaders. A-Frame is amazing so thanks for creating and maintaining it!
PS: Oh, and you can even do AR and VR with it.
mawadev 3 hours ago [-]
Feels like we try to turn anything we do into a career or job, especially with the odd ML angle. How about you "do graphics programming" instead of "being a graphics programmer"? Like start doing simple stuff until it clicks and you see it for being logistics to the GPU, then you can layer on top all the crazy concepts. Its like a small mountain you climb and suddenly everything clicks and you think like "oh my"... the possibilities and things to experiment with...
xboxnolifes 47 minutes ago [-]
I don't think the wording implies a career or job. It's more implying an identity. "I'm a rock climber", "I'm a gamer", "I'm an artist", "I'm a mother", "I'm a father", "I'm a gym bro", "I'm a graphics programmer". None of these necessarily imply career or job, though they do tend to imply more than just a passing, casual involvement.
I would say being a long-time user of Photoshop and Blender helps a lot. It's not a main tool, but supplemental. Maybe AI will take over some of this though.
Hell, maybe that other stuff too, hahaha!
SirHackalot 3 hours ago [-]
Why outsource my learning to Al? The whole point is the joy of the process. I could easily take a photo of a scene (since the inception of photography) instead of learning to paint it, but I would gain no skills through that. People still paint. I'm just tired, boss... I yearn for a past when we didn't have to end every conversation with a disclaimer about Al taking over.
playorizaya 37 seconds ago [-]
Yeah depends what/why you wanna do.
As a kid I wanted to make games when I got older, I always saw learning to program as a means to that end.
It wasn’t until I was deep into my career that I started developing all these preferences and ego and suddenly caring about the craft of the craft - specializing in work I never imagined spending so much time and energy on, career aspects I never meant to work into my personal identity.
Part of me feels a huge sense of relief with LLMs and image gen - because finally I don’t have to be the maniac anymore! The machine can be the machine again, I don’t have to sit at an IDE for 13 hours grinding out tedium.
Now I can make games, now I can do art.
In that sense it’s a lot like the early arts and literature movements - a renaissance - where the printing press, canvas, international finance, and the enabling of the rapid production of ideas paid off tremendously in the following decades and centuries.
We’ll get great films, games, stories, and research because of this stuff. And then great innovation - stuff we could not do without it at unimaginable scales.
psram1986 3 hours ago [-]
trigonometry->Coordinate Geometry -> Linear Algebra applied to graphics
Once you have that intuition, the rest is all figuring out the stages of the graphics pipeline and the frameworks like opengl and their constituent data structures.
725686 45 minutes ago [-]
Claude Code
jplusequalt 3 hours ago [-]
I'm a graphics programmer.
The most useful resources I've found for graphics are scratchapixel, UC Davis' graphics lectures, songho's articles, and Essential Math for Games and Interactive Applications. I highly recommend you read this last resource front to back. Seriously, its the best freaking math reference for graphics out there.
But knowing theory is not sufficient. You also need to get your hands dirty by writing code: learn how to build a software rasterizer (check out Tiny renderer) and a ray tracer (Ray Tracing in One Weekend series). Preferably in a language like C++. Then move onto APIs. I recommend you learn OpenGL, but if you're okay with being confused as all hell try Vulkan. Or WebGPU if you're a hipster (/s).
Finally, try to build some stuff. A simple engine. A non-trivial technique. A game. Whatever.
Unfortunately, you're unlikely to get hired working as a rendering engineer without having serious connections, or by having adjacent experience in the industry. Doubly so now that everyone is convinced junior engineers are unnecessary.
sph 2 hours ago [-]
Thank you! I started recently as a greybeard engineer, and I found SDL3 GPU to be modern enough yet not too low level for a newbie compared to Vulkan. SDL in general is a fantastic framework. And if you use it from Odin, the dev experience is so smooth and enjoyable as everything you need to create graphical applications is builtin.
I will definitely check out Essential Math for Games and Interactive Applications, I feel I need some solid understanding of theory to see how it all fits together.
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
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!
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.
The rapid advances, in a trend replicating throughout society, push out the middle in favor of the top.
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.
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.
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’
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.
Another staple of HN I abhor is “don’t bother learning this cool thing unless an official IQ test says you are over 150.”
“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
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?
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.
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.
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.)
I've been in ML for ~5 years in multiple FAANGs and I have never seen a rotation matrix.
How much do you even think about explicit matrix math when doing high-level ML?
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_value_decomposition
> there is absolutely no sense in which the SVD/PCA decomposition is just a rotation matrix... (hint: scaling is extremely important)
...
> SVD is the decomposition of a matrix into two rotation matrices and a scaling matrix, by definition:
yes that's exactly what i was implying when i said SVD more than just rotation, scaling is also important.
my point, which is my same original point, is that if you think learning about rotation/euler matrices is going to prepare you in any way, shape, or form for ML (vis-a-vis SVD/PCA or RoPE or anything else) you're in for a very rude awakening.
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
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.
"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 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.
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.
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, ...
You don’t need to be JC to earn a decent living as a graphics/game programmer.
Graphics aren't my specialty, but as a musician, sound designer and producer, by far the most effective/influential audio DSP coders I'm aware of understand the basics of music, the physics/acoustics of sounds, and the gotchas at the interface between discrete digital processes and how we perceive and interpret stimuli.
I think graphics programmers benefit from having an artistic mindset, but they usually work so low level that it isn’t necessary to be successful.
AI changed the calculus a bit (or at least, it has the potential to) but I think that was a huge part of the whole "learn to code" movement in the mid 2000s, to start treating software development as a "feature, not a product" of existing experts in their field so that the people most familiar with their domain are actually the ones making the software instead of having to translate the requirements down to a dev team.
They needed warm bodies for their projects, as the usual source of manpower was grinding leetcode to work on bigtech at salaries that would make an accenture business type vomit in disgust.
I also have some notebooks with SymPy code examples here: https://github.com/minireference/noBSLAnotebooks
Start with just <a-box> and <a-sky>, add some animations, then add some community components if it's not enough. Still not enough then modify via ThreeJS, all the way to shaders. A-Frame is amazing so thanks for creating and maintaining it!
PS: Oh, and you can even do AR and VR with it.
This guy has some good art: https://www.khanacademy.org/profile/kaid_1019042693170894950...
If you want to work with Windows, probably DirectX.
2. Make awesome shaders. Check this out: https://fragcoord.xyz
I would say being a long-time user of Photoshop and Blender helps a lot. It's not a main tool, but supplemental. Maybe AI will take over some of this though.
Hell, maybe that other stuff too, hahaha!
As a kid I wanted to make games when I got older, I always saw learning to program as a means to that end.
It wasn’t until I was deep into my career that I started developing all these preferences and ego and suddenly caring about the craft of the craft - specializing in work I never imagined spending so much time and energy on, career aspects I never meant to work into my personal identity.
Part of me feels a huge sense of relief with LLMs and image gen - because finally I don’t have to be the maniac anymore! The machine can be the machine again, I don’t have to sit at an IDE for 13 hours grinding out tedium.
Now I can make games, now I can do art.
In that sense it’s a lot like the early arts and literature movements - a renaissance - where the printing press, canvas, international finance, and the enabling of the rapid production of ideas paid off tremendously in the following decades and centuries.
We’ll get great films, games, stories, and research because of this stuff. And then great innovation - stuff we could not do without it at unimaginable scales.
Once you have that intuition, the rest is all figuring out the stages of the graphics pipeline and the frameworks like opengl and their constituent data structures.
The most useful resources I've found for graphics are scratchapixel, UC Davis' graphics lectures, songho's articles, and Essential Math for Games and Interactive Applications. I highly recommend you read this last resource front to back. Seriously, its the best freaking math reference for graphics out there.
But knowing theory is not sufficient. You also need to get your hands dirty by writing code: learn how to build a software rasterizer (check out Tiny renderer) and a ray tracer (Ray Tracing in One Weekend series). Preferably in a language like C++. Then move onto APIs. I recommend you learn OpenGL, but if you're okay with being confused as all hell try Vulkan. Or WebGPU if you're a hipster (/s).
Finally, try to build some stuff. A simple engine. A non-trivial technique. A game. Whatever.
Unfortunately, you're unlikely to get hired working as a rendering engineer without having serious connections, or by having adjacent experience in the industry. Doubly so now that everyone is convinced junior engineers are unnecessary.
I will definitely check out Essential Math for Games and Interactive Applications, I feel I need some solid understanding of theory to see how it all fits together.