I'll also link a comment[1] I made a while back about learning 3D graphics. There's no better teacher than manually implementing the rasterisation and ray-tracing pipelines.
The 3D software rendering is still the most popular lecture from our school even after all these years. And it really surprises me because we "spend a lot of time" talking about some old techniques (MS-DOS, Amiga, ST, Archimedes, etc.). But it's fun to see how much doing things manually help students understand the math and the data movement that the GPU helps automate and vectorize in modern systems.
That's too much of a stretch, but I believe games of the next era will be optimized more towards integrated GPUs (such as AMD's iGPU in the Steam Deck and Steam Machine).
When hardware is priced out for most consumers (along with a global supply chain collapse due to tariffs and a potential Taiwan invasion), a new era awaits where performance optimization is going to be critical again for games. I expect existing game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine falling out because of all the performance issues they have, and maybe we can return to a temporary "wild west" era where everyone has their own hacky solution to cram stuff into limited hardware.
I tried doing this in Python a bit ago. It did not go well and it really showed how SLOW Python really is.
Even with just an 1280x720 window, setting every pixel to a single color by setting a value in a byte array and then using a PyGame function to just give it a full frame to draw, I maxed out at like 10 fps. I tried so many things and simply could not get any faster.
7 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 17.4 ms ] threadTinyRenderer: https://haqr.eu/tinyrenderer/
ScratchAPixel: https://www.scratchapixel.com/index.html
3D Computer Graphics Programming by Pikuma (paid): https://pikuma.com/courses/learn-3d-computer-graphics-progra...
Ray-tracing:
Ray Tracing in One Weekend: https://raytracing.github.io/
Ray Tracing Gems: https://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems/
Physically Based Rendering, 4th Edition: https://pbr-book.org/
Both:
Computer Graphics from Scratch: https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/
I'll also link a comment[1] I made a while back about learning 3D graphics. There's no better teacher than manually implementing the rasterisation and ray-tracing pipelines.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46410210#46416135
The 3D software rendering is still the most popular lecture from our school even after all these years. And it really surprises me because we "spend a lot of time" talking about some old techniques (MS-DOS, Amiga, ST, Archimedes, etc.). But it's fun to see how much doing things manually help students understand the math and the data movement that the GPU helps automate and vectorize in modern systems.
sure, rasterizing triangle is not so hard, but.. you know, rasterizing rectangle is far far easier
When hardware is priced out for most consumers (along with a global supply chain collapse due to tariffs and a potential Taiwan invasion), a new era awaits where performance optimization is going to be critical again for games. I expect existing game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine falling out because of all the performance issues they have, and maybe we can return to a temporary "wild west" era where everyone has their own hacky solution to cram stuff into limited hardware.
Even with just an 1280x720 window, setting every pixel to a single color by setting a value in a byte array and then using a PyGame function to just give it a full frame to draw, I maxed out at like 10 fps. I tried so many things and simply could not get any faster.