#What are you working on daily?

16 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

fallen comet
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Hi! I've been working as a web dev for a few years now and I want to do graphics programming as a job instead. But what does that even mean? I'm sure building a renderer is not a daily task. Those of you working in the field: What do you do daily? My horror scenarios would be dealing with driver problems / compatibility and never do some shader programming or something that produces visible results. So what do you do and do you like it?

cerulean venture
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I work on drivers so I pretty much exclusively deal with abstract driver problems daily bleakekw
I suppose the direction that does the most shader programming/stuff with visible results would be tech art

split patio
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I work in games as a rendering lead and most of the people on my team do indeed work on shaders and rendering features on a daily basis. There are also some that tend to work more on the backend rendering architecture as well, it depends. There’s also times where people look into bugs, do research, profile and optimize, make tools or hookup data pipeline code to said tools, it varies depending on the point in the dev cycle.

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Working on really tough GPU crashes or even driver/compiler bugs is part of the job unfortunately, but definitely not the majority.

fallen comet
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That sounds good. I mean occasionally reading up on the API and what drivers are doing is fine. 😄

split patio
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If you wanted to get into games you could potentially leverage your web dev experience to get a tools position, and then move over to graphics gradually. But games is a crazy business. 🙂

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If you wanted a graphics job right away I would probably expect to spend some time on your own learning and making a portfolio.

fallen comet
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Yeah, I consider going back to university and doing a masters degree in visual computing. When working full time in a completely different field it's hard to build a portfolio. I don't really need a job in games. But I also can't estimate how big the market is for a gpu programmer. 🤷‍♂️

iron hawk
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The game in general has multiple requests coming regularly - it can be some gameplay mechanic that needs the right visual feedback, or a cool cosmetic to sell, or a problem with our lighting of the environment, or a bug about some feature misbehaving, or a performance issue of eating too much resource (memory cpu gpu).

Many of those include shader programming. Basically anything that has to do with gameplay - new ability, vfx, etc is shader and API layer to control when to trigger it and for how many seconds or with what color.

Other stuff might require experiments R&D, some hacky or smart solutions etc.

Optim always means profiling and analysis before identifying and fixing the problem.

sage star
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I work on rendering engine features for games. Most of the time it is either adapting a feature or attempting to write an entirely new feature with a new approach. A good chunk of time is also spend optimizing code before release or in general.

Most of the code i write is shader code and gpu management code.

At home i do the same but more on a backend level. I also implement way more other code in my hobby projects.

fallen comet
sage star
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at work (call of duty) we have our own engine because its not too hard to have a "better" (imo its better) render backend if you have lots of money

split patio
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Custom engine here as well

fierce stirrup
magic quarry
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We work on beating DXC and other compilers into submission

fierce stirrup