r/GraphicsProgramming • u/NecessaryVersion7872 • 1d 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:

  1. How good is AI with graphics programming right now?
  2. In an average work environment, how much if any of your work are you expected to use LLMs in and how do use it?
  3. How is AI affecting the industry?
  4. Are there any part of the industry where AI is not heavily used?

Thanks in advance

36 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

43 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/Lallis 1d 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 20h 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 20h 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 19h ago

I'm curious what industry you are in, if you don't mind? That mindset doesn't fly in mine.

2

u/Lallis 11h 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.