How do I become a graphics programmer? – A guide from AMD Game Engineering team

Re:How do I become a graphics programmer? – A guide from AMD... by charcircuit on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @07:03PM (#38387107)

All programmers at a certain level must understand the lower levels of the stack they are building upon. I think most people can get by with just learning the abstractions that are provided to them. With time people can learn more and more about lower levels as they specialize. Most people who become graphics programmers don't need to know the low levels of how a GPU works, so I personally do not think that is a good place to start for people who want to get into graphics programming.

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Re:How do I become a graphics programmer? – A guide from AMD... by achierius on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @08:03PM (#38387769)

Are you a graphics programmer, or are you just saying this because that's true in the CPU world (where you have experience)? From both my own and my colleagues' experiences, I would 100% disagree: the nature of GPU architectures means you are forced to deal with super low-level details from the very beginning. Part of this is because graphics (and GPGPU compute) programming is inherently performance-constrained: if it wasn't, you could just do your work on the CPU with much less of a headache. Even just generally though, the path to running code on a GPU is much simpler — the hardware does less work for the programmer, there's no operating system to manage threads, everything's a single binary, etc. — which means that there's less to insulate you from what's underneath.

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Re:How do I become a graphics programmer? – A guide from AMD... by charcircuit on Wednesday November 22, 2023 @11:12PM (#38389180)

>Are you a graphics programmer, or are you just saying this because that's true in the CPU world (where you have experience)

Neither.

>the nature of GPU architectures means you are forced to deal with super low-level details from the very beginning.

Not everyone is trying to push the hardware to its limits by making the best thing possible with the hardware. Plenty of projects can get along fine with a A/AA renderer or with unoptimized shaders.

>there's no operating system to manage threads

There literally is. Or if you disagree the firmware manages the threads.

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