Computer Graphics

There’s no shortage of examples of beginners rendering a simple triangle (or a cube), and with the new APIs having completely displaced the oxygen of older APIs, there is a certain expectation of ridiculous complexity and raw grit required to tickle some pixels on the display. 1000 lines of code, two weeks of grinding, debugging black screens etc, etc. Something is obviously wrong here, and it’s not going to get easier.

I would argue that trying to hammer through the brick wall of graphics is the wrong approach in 2025. Graphics itself is less and less relevant for any hopeful new GPU programmer. Notice I wrote “GPU programmer”, not graphics programmer, because most interesting work these days happens with compute shaders, not traditional “graphics” rendering.

Instead, I would argue we should start teaching compute with a debugger/profiler first mindset, building up the understanding of how GPUs execute code, and eventually introduce the fixed-function rasterization pipeline as a specialization once all the fundamentals are already in place. The raster pipeline was simple enough to teach 20 years ago, but those days are long gone, and unless you plan to hack on pre-historic games as a hobby project, it’s an extremely large API surface to learn.