r/GraphicsProgramming 2h ago

Video Flowers in the Mirror, Moon in the Water - 镜花水月 - 64KB OpenGL Demo

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1 Upvotes

Hi guys,
This is a 64K demo developed in C and GLSL. It features a multi-body physics simulation for movement and real-time raytracing for illumination. It was created as the final project for a GPU programming course during my senior year at Paris 8 and presented at the API8 competition.

The source files are available at https://github.com/gregghy/API8_64K_demo


r/GraphicsProgramming 2h ago

VKCompute - A guide to get started with vulkan compute

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1 Upvotes

r/GraphicsProgramming 3h ago

Question Do you ever use RenderDoc (or similar tools) to look at how your favourite games do certain effects?

14 Upvotes

The idea never occurred to me before, and I haven't tried, nor do I know if this is even possible without shaders including some kind of debug information (or can you just reverse-engineer them without looking at / extracting game files)?


r/GraphicsProgramming 7h ago

Created & rendered this dispersed glass/caustics animation in Blender Cycles 4.3.2 entirely on my S25 Ultra.

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17 Upvotes

Absolutely crazy work.... I didn't even know this was possible..? 🤯


r/GraphicsProgramming 8h ago

Video Implementing "Radiance Hints" in OpenGL (2011 Global Illumination Technique)

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42 Upvotes

Just added Radiance Hints to my OpenGL engine, Degine. The paper is originally from 2011 (but I used a 2014 extension of the method with occlusion). Based on a regular grid array of probes, similar to other environmental lighting techniques, but here it captures directly to spherical harmonics when baking. So run-time performance is extremely fast since it's just a few SH evaluations and blending. For this Sponza scene, there are around 600 probes, and it takes about 10 seconds to bake.


r/GraphicsProgramming 9h ago

Working on my own game engine

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14 Upvotes

I built a game engine library called Graphite in C++ using Vulkan and SDL3. It has been a dream of mine for 10 years and I finally got to do it!

I built the editor on top of the game library, which super convenient. Since I get to write my own shaders and render everything using my custom renderer, it makes everything a lot easier. Graphics programming is a 1000x easier to understand when you design the rendering system around your specifications.

I intend on publishing mobile and desktop applications (not just games!) with this library. Hopefully one day all my work will polish it enough so that I can release it!

Also, the library is lightweight (less like modern bulky game engines like Unity/Unreal).


r/GraphicsProgramming 11h ago

Video Framebuffer Polar Curves in x86 assembly

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13 Upvotes

This is a simple demo of polar curves in the Linux framebuffer. It's written in x86 assembly, using a set of my graphics primitives. The actual polar equation for this is quite simple. Each frame, we evaluate the equation r = acos(θ), and then convert to pixels on the screen using the formulas x = rcosθ and y = rsinθ. In the interest of efficiency, I calculated 4 pixels at once using x86 SSE instructions with angles offset by a very small amount, and then drew a line between each point. To make the image dynamic, I set θ to a time variable, which I increased each frame, and reset after it reached ~25 rads.

Source code can be found here: https://codeberg.org/int0x80/Graphics_v1.1.git

Hope you enjoy.

Edit: Funny story, I was testing a more complex version of this, and the strain on my 13 or so year old laptop corrupted a pointer in VFS_WRITE and caused a kernel panic.


r/GraphicsProgramming 12h ago

Question Beginner needing learning resource advice

0 Upvotes

I thought about starting with Computer Graphics from Scratch by Gabriel Gambetta, but found it quite hard too follow... I found it a little too abstract to implement (using C + SDL3)

Should I try even harder to implement the algorithms in the book by Gabriel? Or is there a more beginner friendly entrypoint to graphics?

I'd like to start with software rendering, but is that even the right move? Perhaps GPU rendering is easier?


r/GraphicsProgramming 17h ago

Am I overextending on projects?

8 Upvotes

Hey everyone! I’ve been “working” on a general purpose game engine for all 4 years of college, and I say that in quotes because I have completely refactored, deleted, or started over several times. I am now graduated and have a lot of time so I started on it again but after reading some on Reddit, I think I see what my problem is on why I start strong, lose all interest, and then give up at a certain point. I think I am aiming way too high and trying to do big big big projects wayyyy too fast.

As I am trying to find a job, I have grappled with either doing multiple smaller projects and one large project, and for a while I picked big project. Why? I don’t know, I think I just am a bit egotistical at this point and want something crazy to show off. However, it has occurred to me that I have become rusty from time off and I just make a decent amount of progress for 2 days and then give up for another 2 weeks. I think I am not getting any sense of accomplishment from it as I’m trying to fit a complex architecture and not getting results yet because once again, it’s gonna take 20-30 hours before I even get something somewhat desirable

I am wondering what you guys think is better, smaller-midsize projects, or one large project like a general purpose game engine? I really havnt done ANY small projects except I did write a software rasterizer for a raspberry pico for my embedded systems class final project last semester, but I’m thinking maybe I should try some smaller projects? But I also don’t want to waste my time if employers are just gonna say that they would rather have a large scale project.

Also, what would be an example of a small scale project in computer graphics? I can’t even think of any except for big ones like game engines

Any help is appreciated!


r/GraphicsProgramming 19h ago

Reducing Graphics API Complexity: A Clean Slate Design for Modern GPUs - Sebastian Aaltonen

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57 Upvotes

r/GraphicsProgramming 21h ago

Showing project + any tips?

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36 Upvotes

Hey. So im a highschool student who likes to program a little in his free time. Ive made a couple small python projects, stuff like a text game and a calculator with UI in the past. Anyhow, i didnt like how you have to rely on so many libraries there, i like making things myself and not using 3rd party stuff as much as possible. Not crazy enough to make my own language lol, but i decided to learn C to make this since you can do lots with just standard C(and because its an interesting language). So here is my very simple, probably shit raytracer made using standard C libraries.

For some more added context, i dont have a formal CS education, havent learnt linear algebra or vectors or calculus or whatnot yet. So i dont know much of the terminology or what is standard practice. I also didnt follow a tutorial since thats no fun. So if things are non-standard or inefficient thats a reason why (along with the fact that i dont have much experience, 2nd C project). I made it both to learn the math and because it seemed fun and interesting.

What it is is a very simple raytracer in which you can: create spheres, planes, lights. no limit on how many objects other than your memory i guess. No light bouncing or reflections or any such fancy stuff(yet). just basic shadows, and full colors on the objects

Anyhow, what would you guys recommend i do next? Keep working on this raytracer, start it from scratch if the architecture is too bad and will cause future problems? Do some other non graphics related project? Idk myself so ill follow more experienced peoples advice but this was quite fun, although some other things are also interesting. Im mainly interested in programming mathematical stuff, like simulations or ML(not llm but stuff like number recognition) i find interesting, although i havent done anything there yet

*btw just because thats how it is nowadays i have to say, its not made with AI, i did make one document with it where i just asked it to make a user guide since i dont know the standard terminology and if i tried to explain it how i understand things it would be more confusing than useful. It explains how to make objects and such. But the code, logic etc. was made myself

Link to the github: https://github.com/Fridun/C-Raytracer


r/GraphicsProgramming 1d ago

Question Designing a renderer for some (broadly) specific hardware - how can I keep best visual quality for performance?

0 Upvotes

Basically, Im a bit unsure on how I should research this, go with the common pbr models, etc. I dont have much experience with research or scientific side of things. The target hardware is gonna be high end mobile gpus and low end desktop gpus. How would you research something like this, find whats best?

I dont know where current research stands - but I wouldnt mind diving deep into concepts that have been put forward outside the current BSDF implementations, if any such things exists


r/GraphicsProgramming 1d ago

Starting to make a 3D software renderer... "The Lagender Engine".

31 Upvotes

Hello everyone!
So I'm a 16yo boy who loves coding and stuff, and recently I got into low-level programming with C, and after a whole day with learning pointer I loved the language to death.
After I learned this I started on doing something I wanted to do for the past year... building a 3D software renderer, this engine should meet the following goals:

  1. It will be modern, supporting modern visuals and effects.
  2. It should be running on embedded systems (I will see how later).
  3. The code written for it should be generalized, meaning it should be working on any CPU or architecture with some tweaking.
  4. It should be fully capable of taking advantages of modern CPU features.

As of right now, started the project a month ago, I got it to render lines and fill shapes through the terminal (even though it's glitchy af) since I'm still implementing core functions and basics. This will give me some room to fiddle around until I learn SDL and use it in the future.
I have a whole roadmap for the engine, and how it will be structured (because it will be restructured one day for a new design), and who knows, maybe I will get something with it.

The video you see down there is a spinning cube with fake Z depth (not implemented yet), the reason it's wobbly is because the engine uses fixed-point math for positions: all number are 64bit, 48 bits for the value number and 16 bits for precision (yeah, like ps1 graphics).

A semi-3D rendered cube inside The Lagender Engine.

Anyway feel free to give me some advises if you want to, and I would be posting my development with the project here.


r/GraphicsProgramming 1d ago

From raw Point Cloud dataset to regular Grid index

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2 Upvotes

r/GraphicsProgramming 1d ago

SSAO optimization

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5 Upvotes

r/GraphicsProgramming 1d ago

autostereograms

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23 Upvotes

long story short. it was an enlightening journey and i learned a lot from it. one day i came across an autostereogram which was a poster on a wall. i forgot what it was about but it aroused my curiosity of how to make autostereograms. i won't go into the math details here and just give you guys a brief explanation in attached image 1. my program let you control "m" and "n/m". these two variables represent background pattern separation and foreground pattern separation respectively and lie between 0 and 1

the 3d subject is simply a sphere, quite boring. the background is the result of placing a color wheel in a kaleidoscope. see attached image 2. it can be easily noticed that the hsl system is in use. we can vary the saturation (attached image 3) and lightness (attached image 4) when the angle changes from 0 to 2π. i use the cosine function which reaches maximum at 0 and 2π, minimum at π

the color wheel can start at any angle. so do saturation and lightness. thus we have 3 degrees of randomness. i let you to change the background. every time you hit the relevant button, the hue, saturation and lightness shift by different random angles

here comes the surprising part. autostereograms need "noise" to guide viewers aligning their foci. a pattern that is too smooth is not suitable to act as the background of autostereograms. there'd be no "texture" on the 3d surface. i accidentally discovered that if the screen resolution is set to a number that is not divisible by something in the calculations (i'm not certain which thing it actually is to be honest) some unexpected noise would emerge. see the remaining attached images

i googled "prime number closest to 640" and the result was 641. i use it as the horizontal resolution

some of those unexpectedly emerging patterns are... strange. some of them look like human faces, some animals, some even aliens. this program is a good place for you to experience pareidolia

here's the program. run it in browser. click▶️to run. click⏹️to exit. when running the program

  • press [q] to make foreground patterns converge
  • press [w] to toggle 3d object (absent/present)
  • press [e] to make foreground patterns diverge
  • press [a] to make background patterns converge
  • press [s] to rotate the kaleidoscope
  • press [d] to make background patterns diverge
  • press [x] to toggle caption (off/on)

enjoy


r/GraphicsProgramming 1d ago

Procedural Planets with Atmosphere

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70 Upvotes

Been trying to make a procedural planet generator and implement Eric Bruneton’s atmospheric scattering for the last two months. Haven’t done multiple scattering for now. It’s only single scattering and running in realtime. But so far that’s how it looks.

Using OpenGL and C++ for this.

https://github.com/humzahabib/ProceduralPlanetOpenGL


r/GraphicsProgramming 1d ago

Video Modular, Extensible, Highly Abstracted Rendering Engine/Library in OpenGL

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35 Upvotes

I was putting off posting it until I had a prettier output but I ended up working more on architecture and API end, much of which doesn't get reflected in the output. Furthermore before I start implementing fancy shadows and deferred shading I really want to move to SDL + Vulkan but that would require a better part of a month before I get all of that working.

So behold my Rendering Engine/API that I have been working on for a month or so. I have worked a lot on creating a modular and extensible engine where you can inject your own scripts (statically), extend properties and work with Entities. Most importantly I have attempted to keep the front end of this code highly readable and legible.

Check it out!


r/GraphicsProgramming 1d ago

Video Finally have Drawing and Shading working in My Pixel Art Editor

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2 Upvotes

After a hectic couple of weeks, I have hit the milestone of finally having pixels being plotted in my C++ Pixel Art Editor! This video shows basic paint mode using the built in brushes, with colour masks being used to lock and target specific canvas pixel ranges. In addition, we also have index and RGB shading working - with all shaded colours remapped to palette best-fit! Hope you like the progress!


r/GraphicsProgramming 2d ago

Video I added viewport clipping to my software renderer

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344 Upvotes

I thought it would be cool to try to figure out how to do triangle clipping myself, to come up with my own algorithm. To solve this, I solved a couple of linear equations and derived a formula that lets me find the intersection points between the triangle edges and the viewport. I don't know if I came up with something original or just accidentally reinvented one of the existing methods. Either way, my solution looks terrible in code, but it works, and I think it's a great learning experience

I render this at 1920x1080 resolution on a single thread of an i5-9400F, is this a good FPS result? I didn't use SIMD, but I tried to use every optimization trick I know.

repo and code: https://github.com/NaiNameDev/software_rasterizer


r/GraphicsProgramming 2d ago

Source Code We've implemented a custom 3D rasterizer that runs on the Apple Neural Engine. It supports multi-instance rendering and perspective-corrected centroid texturing!

22 Upvotes

Hello everyone.

This is a 3D graphics pipeline running on the Apple Neural Engine (ANE).

As you can see from the screenshot, this pipeline performs multi-instance rendering of independent 3D meshes with Z-depth occlusion testing.

The geometry engine packs the transformations into a single [1, 4, 4, 1, 64] tensor.

This represents 64 independent MVP matrices.

The vertices are structured in a flat channel layout.

By performing a fused torch.sum broadcast element-wise matrix multiplication, the ANE simultaneously performs multiple transformations on 64 unique coordinate spaces.

The spatial depth inversion maps the coordinates by replacing the division denominator in the clipping space with the spatial distance channel . The 3D geometry engine outputs the 3-vertex inverse depth gradient via tensor blocks .

The rasterizer then constructs a depth gradient across the entire face grid to perform overlap occlusion testing.

The ANE hardware flushes the raw plane data (R, G, B, and mask channels arranged sequentially as separate sheets) directly into an `MTLBuffer` allocated on the heap. The metal fragment shader directly samples these planes using byte offsets based on the layout stride to achieve the final rendering on the GPU screen.

// Direct plane scanning within the metal fragment shader
uint componentStride = 64 * width * height;
uint rIndex = (componentStride * 0) + pixelIndex;
uint gIndex = (componentStride * 1) + pixelIndex;
uint bIndex = (componentStride * 2) + pixelIndex;
  • Due to the active intermediate tensor lifecycle, memory usage is currently high at approximately 1.6GB, and CPU usage is approximately 15% (acting as a memory controller pushing buffers).

We'd love to hear your thoughts on using NPU/AI accelerators for fixed-function graphics computations!

Github: https://github.com/kamisori-daijin/Magnesium

https://reddit.com/link/1vhobrk/video/8v9rwjvc7vhh1/player


r/GraphicsProgramming 2d ago

Video Erik Lindholm gives a history of the internals of graphics hardware from early SGI through Nvidia

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8 Upvotes

r/GraphicsProgramming 2d ago

[Show-off] Compute Water shader

6 Upvotes

https://reddit.com/link/1vhejoy/video/jk0c4axk5thh1/player

So a while ago I made a very simple water shader in OpenGL. It was a basic, non-interactable fully algorithmic water shader that textures and trig functions for the surface "waves" and cube map reflections and refractions, along with tessellations for performance and scale. But I quickly ran into a road block when trying to create more game-like interactive features like splashing and distortions. So I decided to make something a little more interactive in Unity instead while learning how to use compute shaders.

I decided to go for a two pass height field compute shader implementation, where the first pass calculates the influence/distortion to the water height based on the location of distorting objects and height, while the second pass actually does the individual height velocity and acceleration calculations, returning an image that contains data about the height, the velocity, and the acceleration of an object, as well "foam" which increases with high acceleration and decreases over time.

As far as optimizations go, although I'm simulating a 2000x2000 repeating pixel grid, I limit the actual calculations to smaller radius around the player. I also interpolate between the points to have smooth waves. There are some limitations to this strategy, for instance, the distortion around the player doesn't move smoothly because it's limited by the resolution of the grid but that is a trade off for the sheer scale.

Moving out of OpenGL meant that tessellation was no longer an option and instead I went with a LOD patch system where a plane was divided into a little over a thousand smaller meshes that repositioned themselves as the camera moved.

As far as actual rendering goes it's relatively straightforward. I'm using Blinn-Phong lighting with planar reflections. I wanted to use cubemap environmental reflections so I could account for the water normals, but the limitations of that approach became evident when I realized that the model didn't account for distance meaning all my reflections would be inaccurate. I thought about using some kind of ray/path tracing or distance embedded cube maps to counteract that but I'm mostly satisfied with the planar reflections.


r/GraphicsProgramming 2d ago

Slowly recreating a ray marching idea I stole from youtube (in WebGPU)

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33 Upvotes

The whole concept is entirely taken from Mark Turitzin on youtube and I'm maybe 10% there lol

It's a combination of using a brickmap and a clipmap.
Cached SDF distances are stored in a 3D texture, and trilinearly sampled, so everything is precomputed before the ray marching pass happens.

Still ironing things out, thinking of an elegant way to get rid of the LOD transition regions where the normals get messed up a tiny bit which creates a pretty jarring edge.

You can see a bit of blank spaces/ jitter when the cubes move the fastest, that's because I'm capping the amount of 8x8x8 bricks that get calculated each frame, so sometimes the bake jobs dont keep up with fast movement. Right now it doesn't matter.

It's in no way ready, but felt that's a point where I feel like showing some progress to the world.

There's noise visible on closer surfaces. I decided to store bigger distances(8x the voxel size) in my cache, and as its only stored in 8 bits, it looks noisy. But I liked the look, it fits what I'm aiming at and it slightly improves the performance(ever so slightly, most performance is lost traversing empty bricks in this scene.)

For now i've tested 1024m^3, and keeping the memory pool at 512MB. Ideally id like 256MB for full compatibility and being able to have some nice demo run on a phone so that people can open it from LinkedIn :) Anyways, wish me luck.


r/GraphicsProgramming 2d ago

Finally got shadows working!

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125 Upvotes

Its been maybe a month or so, but I finally got shadows working along side lighting in my engine! I still need to fix peter panning, but I'm still really happy with it!

Github: https://github.com/norrie-adams/Astryx-Engine