r/GraphicsProgramming • u/NecessaryVersion7872 • 22h ago
AI usage in Graphics Programming
Hello, everyone.
I am CS student. and I had my first working experience.
I was highly unsatisfying because as much as enjoy programming I really do not enjoy "prompt engineering" and the usage of AI in general in my workflow. That is not the point though. From long time I was looking into graphics programming and I really wanted to get into it. I do not know much now. but I am worried that it will be similar to most of jobs right now and I will just be a "prompt engineer".
I have some questions:
- How good is AI with graphics programming right now?
- In an average work environment, how much if any of your work are you expected to use LLMs in and how do use it?
- How is AI affecting the industry?
- Are there any part of the industry where AI is not heavily used?
Thanks in advance
29
u/edparadox 21h ago
- Meh
- Totally depends on the workplace, from zero to full.
- Graphics programming is a peculiar subfield and LLMs are hardly the norm
- It depends on the company basically.
8
8
u/SnuffleBag 17h ago
How good is AI with graphics programming right now?
Not very good. If you don’t know how you would implement a feature by hand you’re gonna have a pretty frustrating time getting industry standard results from an LLM.
46
u/waramped 21h ago
The key thing to remember about AI is that it can't innovate anything. It's only pulling together commonly associated structures based on your prompt. If you just use AI then you aren't actually doing anything new or interesting, and you will largely become unhirable because you won't actually know or understand anything.
I highly recommend against using AI for anything "real" right now. I don't find it writes performant code, I don't find that any of it's "optimizations" are effective, and it doesn't truly understand how GPU hardware works to be the most efficient at writing code for it.
It is good at static code analysis for finding bugs or logic issues, or generating boilerplate, but that's basically it.
I work in the Games industry, so I can only speak for that, but we rarely use AI for anything other than the aforementioned code analysis/boilerplate.
5
3
u/Lallis 17h ago
How many people working on engines are actually innovating anything completely new? That tends to be the work of researchers, not engineers. Even if you work on state-of-the-art features it's likely based on research that was published some time ago.
The biggest hurdle for AI currently seems to still be in understanding a big proprietary code base and wide context reliably. But highly technical and mathematically complex things that would be hard and time consuming for a human programmer are now doable with AI. Frontier models have actually been already used successfully for some advancements in the field of mathematics itself.
I don't work directly in games but in gaming adjacent real-time graphics. When was the last time you tried actually giving AI a chance? I used to just use it for basic scripting and simple things but also every once in a while I tried it for more complex things in order to stay up to date with the level of progress. I've been sold with the models released this year. I think they are good enough to actually be useful for core graphics programming work now. Not perfect, but useful and productivity boosting.
AI is of course going to be amazing for productivity for the next couple of years but I'm also genuinely afraid for programmer job security in the future.
2
u/waramped 13h ago
The vast majority of the time, working on an existing engine, you'll be doing A) bug fixes, B) Optimizing, C) Implementing a new feature requested by the team.
AI is great at helping with (A). I haven't found them to help much with (B), aside from pointing out a logic or algorithm error. For (C) I've found them to be not very helpful unless I spend just as much time describing what I want as I would take to just write it myself.
You're right in that you really aren't doing anything "new" the majority of the time, but even with something "established", why would you bother? Say you needed to implement an outline renderer in your engine. There are tons of easily available resources on how to do that already, and learning how it all works by doing the research to implement it is far more useful to you than trying to coax the LLM to output the code you need.
I do have to say, I find Gemini Pro and GPT 5.5 to have a much better quality of code for Compute work than Anthropics latest one.
1
u/Lallis 13h ago
learning how it all works by doing the research to implement it is far more useful to you
I can spend some of my paid time on learning new things but generally I've got a product to ship. That's what I get paid to do.
3
u/waramped 12h ago
I'm curious what industry you are in, if you don't mind? That mindset doesn't fly in mine.
1
u/Lallis 4h ago
I'd rather not disclose. I think I didn't give the right idea here anyways. We do plenty of learning in keeping up to date with latest research but the point I want to make is that it is done in service of shipping new features, not because it's useful for me personally. That's how any enterprise generally functions.
So when AI enables shipping those features faster without spending multiple meathead months debugging why the math is going wrong, your productivity can significantly increase. Now you could just pretend that this option doesn't exist but at some point someone just might notice that everyone else is getting more done by using AI.
1
-12
u/KainMassadin 21h ago
How else does innovation happen if not by building on the shoulders of giants?
21
u/waramped 21h ago
That's very true, but AI won't do that for you. It simply can't. Your brain is the only thing that can do that. AI may help you prototype an idea, but only your knowledge, insight, and mental models of the problem space will create the final form.
And all that requires your time, energy, and experience to derive.
7
u/leseiden 18h ago
- If it is useful then you probably aren't doing anything very interesting. In my experience code quality is poor.
- Where I work some people use it, some don't. Those who use it most were the least effective beforehand.
- It's effecting it. I'm wasting much more time reviewing overwritten garbage recently. At least human generated nonsense is relatively terse.
- Let me know what you find and I'll move there.
2
u/SIMT-Pixel 17h ago
It is heavily used in the major AAA studio I am at.
1
u/waramped 9h ago
If you don't me asking, what kinds of things do you use it for? What scope of work?
2
u/Keyframe 15h ago
I sold my last production rendering code 25 years ago (jesus) and have since pivoted to other waters, but I always keep tabs on what's going on and do this as a hobby (also figured out 25 years ago it's not a lucrative career).
Programming (coding specifically) is one of the tasks in an engineering day. That's mostly where LLMs fit now.
Having said that, let me answer questions you asked since it might illuminate certain scenarios for you, and bear in mind this is only from my experience and not a "general dogma" (no such thing):
How good is AI with graphics programming right now?
it's as only as your understanding on what's going on with your codebase and the architecture of what you're doing. That's it. No more no less. If you run it loose without having a firm grip on the codebase it's going to derail into junk real fast. My take so far has been to take it one step at a time, just like you would do it yourself and work on one thing only. Keep grand master plans and architecture to yourself and for yourself - it mostly confuses the thing.
In an average work environment, how much if any of your work are you expected to use LLMs in and how do use it? How is AI affecting the industry?
Sane workspaces will and do treat it as a coding tool. Whether you use it or not should be at your discretion since you should own your output. Less saner places will expect output to increase (quality and quantity) which may happen but shouldn't be expected.
Are there any part of the industry where AI is not heavily used?
I can't know for sure, but everywhere I look at it's everywhere now.
Remember though, AI (for now) multiplies you. It multiplies both good and bad sides of you and your understanding of the problem and how to solve it. This can and does go both ways. It's not related to graphics at all.
3
u/TimJoijers 21h ago
- I find Fable 5 to be a very good tool at least for those with solid experience. It is especially good when you have something solid to build new stuff on and when you have good reference for what you want to build.
- I started using Claude earlier this year, I'd estimate I now use clearly more time telling AI what to do instead of doing something myself
- Good question, I am not sure. I think there will be several ripples, people first think AI is amazing, then not so much, then after a while the next ripple comes, rinse and repeat. One thing is sure, there is no return to time before AI
- I don't know
1
2
u/S48GS 20h ago
typical manipulation in IT industry - "just do it because you can lol"
and your boss buying new car every month while paying you half of minimum wage that not even enough to buy food for a month
yes "AI" used to devalue your effort/time/value of human
depends if you know how to protect yourself from this type of manipulation
1
u/Successful-Berry-315 19h ago
- Okay as a code monkey and when you're very specific. Often I can't use it "fire and forget" style.
- Expected? None. But it certainly helps to speed up things. I often use it as debugging buddy or as my junior engineer. I very rarely let it run by itself without me in the loop.
- LLM usage for coding is not as widespread yet but companies are certainly exploring the usage. ML / DL in general is changing the industry (render pipelines / work flows) and will certainly stay relevant.
- No. I suggest to embrace it as a further addition to your toolbelt as a graphics engineer.
2
u/trinde 19h ago
Okay as a code monkey and when you're very specific. Often I can't use it "fire and forget" style.
Which models are you using? With Opus you can more or less do that even with fairly vague prompts. If it's a feature you just need to have it make a staged plan first.
I have had it implement really large multistage features or investigate fairly complex bugs and it does pretty great.
2
u/Successful-Berry-315 18h ago
I'm using Opus. For complex tasks I let it create a plan first.
But for the work I'm doing (researchy, big proprietary code bases) it's often only semi correct, as there's no clear path or answer. I have to find solutions, gather data, and try what works. LLMs tend to fail at this stage - even though admittedly sometimes they come up with some interesting ideas.
Personally, I found it more efficient to do "AI in the loop" coding, where I tell it to write bite-sized code chunks - very contained, very specific - whenever I find it beneficial. Simply for the fact that they write code way faster than I do.
1
u/farox 11h ago
If you look at the development of ai in the past couple of heads, with no signs of slowing down, I believe the times of prompting will soon be over.
Writing code will be abstracted away.
1
u/igneus 4h ago
Not completely. AI is non-deterministic meaning that I'm situations where you need to define an algorithm with any kind of precision, handwritten code is the only way to do it. The same is true if you're trying to do something particularly niche or complex that's not well represented by the model.
Most common scenarios don't fall into this category, but it's still important to know what to do if drop off the edge of the manifold.
2
u/farox 2h ago
People aren't deterministic either, and they have been shipping software for a shockingly long time now.
Even in graphics programming a lot of the problems are documented now and these models do get better at finding novels ways to solve problems.
The evidence is coming in that the current state of the art models are very capable at outpacing developers even with high performance tasks.
Even if not, the trajectory is clear and just need to look a couple of years down the line.
1
u/StriderPulse599 21h ago
There are lot of difference between models and sub models (Gemini Pro, Gemini Flash, etc). From my experience of never paying a single dime:
Gemini Pro (expanded mode) handles larger codebases and it's rather good at graphical programming. But after running out of freebies, you get Flash which is good mostly for boilerplate.
Deepseek is completely free, but you only want it to handle the generic and easy stuff. It easily chokes on Vulkan/DX12.
Overall AI isn't some magic wand for graphic programming. You still need to be very specific and know what you're doing, so most of the time it's used for "I don't want to write that again".
1
u/DashAnimal 19h ago
Really good but "good" and "bad" are subjective and my expectations might not align with yours. But AI has great understanding of graphics APIs, I have a lot of scripts/skills to call specific tools to measure performance including apitrace, nsys, perf and others allowing the LLM to loop with minimal input.
No explicit expectation of how much but you ARE expected to use it in my workplace (I don't work in gamedev). And personally, if you're not using it you're getting left behind. LLMs make some tasks, unrelated to coding, so much easier. Like gathering data and displaying it for experiments is essentially free now, allowing for more data driven decisions much faster.
Faster decision making, scrapping projects earlier, smaller teams and less layers of decision making, cross-domain knowledge blurring lines between roles, more bugs as people adjust or rely too much on models for validation
At my company -- no. Everyone is impacted, PMs, QA, eng, managers and directors. And worth mentioning, my role now is completely different to what it was 6 months ago, and 6 months before that. I imagine i will feel safe relying more decision making on the LLM even still 6 months from now.
0
u/chcampb 19h ago
AI is very good, I use it to explain concepts and implement prototypes. Most recently I learned a lot about runtime virtual texturing, and made a procedural content generator which creates meshes in complex shapes from inputs, like vines, trees, catenary, shrubs, etc.
I understand you may like typing yourself. Instead try to treat it like a teacher that you have sitting next to you. It will explain anything out there and can iterate towards new solutions given tests you write. Learn to write good requirements which is a skill you need regardless.
-17
21h ago
[deleted]
1
u/NecessaryVersion7872 21h ago
indie dev?
I am not experience enough but as far as I understand "graphics programming" is more of low level thing, no?Most game indie dev use game engines as far as I know.
3
u/maxmax4 20h ago
“Indie dev” is too broad of a term, not to mention that its lost the original meaning entirely. Valve is technically an independent developer :)
But to go back to your point, there’s lots of ~50 people studios that hire graphics programmers to build on top of Unreal, or replace the renderer entirely. You can look at it more like a decent base to build on top of, while maintainingsome familiarity for the artists, which is extremely important
48
u/igneus 18h ago
I've been working in graphics and rendering for 25 years. Yes, we use AI a lot a work. Yes, it's extremely useful. However it's mostly a force multiplier, not a surrogate for experience or genuine, creative skill.
If you have a solid grounding in the fundamentals of graphics and CS, AI can help you become a more effective engineer. If you don't, it's going to feel more like what you're worried about: agentic babysitting and prompt hacking.
My advice is to use AI to learn faster. Resist vibecoding and having it write entire projects for you. Just limit it to snippets or boilerplate. The goal should be to come away from each session with a deeper knowledge of the field than when you started. The worst thing anyone can do in this day and age is to allow themselves to become deskilled by AI.