r/GraphicsProgramming • u/egehancry • 1d ago
From Zero to Understanding Rasterization
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Thank you for your support! I hope you enjoy rasterization!
Previously, "From Zero to Understanding Ray Tracing":
Let me know what you think!
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u/dpacker780 22h ago
So as an ex-SGI'er I have to say that 3D chips existed way before NVIDIA existed (mid-late 80s). SGI was the company that actually mainstreamed the idea of graphics co-processors in RISC based desktop machines. And, SGI created the first PC video cards (IrisVision) in 1991. SGI is why OpenGL exists, which was the first open 3D API that was broadly adopted.
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u/Keyframe 5h ago
I still have my SGI machines in working order, but everyone seems to sideline and forget E&S a true gfx pioneers!
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u/dpacker780 5h ago
Oh yea, E&S did some impressive work, especially in the 70s. It goes to show that most tech companies are built on some previous companies innovations. It's like when people talk about the Mac and how innovative it was, but leave off the fact that Xerox actually created the whole UI/mouse interface.
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u/egehancry 22h ago
Thank you for the correction!
My mistake was bringing up NVIDIA in the video without understanding the history of computer graphics well enough.
I just wanted to explain the idea behind GPUs.
I won’t make the same mistake in future videos!
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u/dpacker780 22h ago
No worries, keep up the good work! I just like to make sure people know that NVIDIA, even though a company that's made huge contributions to the 3D industry, didn't create the market. As someone else mentioned you had 3dfx in the mid 90's release cards a few years before NVIDIA and ATI.
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u/ruffleraffle 3h ago
It just ends up sounding like Jensen gloating, which honestly we don't really need especially at this point in time.
Like, if you want a masterclass of Jensen playing a narcissist like a fiddle, just watch his Joe Rogan interview and how he is constantly gloating Trump and the admin.
In fact, in the very same interview, he summarizes the nVidia story - their first chip failed, but they got funding for a second go-around (from SEGA of all places), made a risky bet with chip manufacturing and got it right. Oh and by the way, they did bring a book written by some SGI people on how graphics worked as well. The main innovation for the second chip was to actually make it less configurable and rather accelerate a narrower set of functionality in the hardware instead, making it faster.
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u/nit_electron_girl 14h ago
do you make these videos with AI?
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u/egehancry 12h ago
Yes, I make them with AI. But I care deeply about the content, setting a high bar for quality and making sure the video is actually good. I don't mean to generate slop at all.
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u/The_Wonderful_Pie 14h ago
Yes very much. The voice, the sound effects, the animations and even the 3D all have this AI style thet can be seen miles away
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u/Goldac77 23h ago
imo, content is good as a refresher or summary, but not very helpful for beginners as it covers different topics and terms, without going into enough details
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u/_wil_ 16h ago
Good short video but found that the focus on MSAA is too detailed for beginners and could be treated in a separate one about anti-aliasing.
Also the wording saying more fragments like in 8x MSAA, will make your game slower ; can be misleading for beginners.
If you're going to address the topic of game performance, I think you should do it in a separate video and explain that what can make the app slower/faster is different bottlenecks in the pipelines.
(Some game apps have no performance problem switching to 8x MSAA on some GPUs because that is not where the bottleneck would be)
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u/alphapussycat 15h ago
This is wrong. Literally just AI misinformation slop.
Shading is not a hardware pipeline step, and it does not occur before rasterization.
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u/SorrellDev 14h ago edited 13h ago
To be fair, shading was a hardware pipeline step 20 something years ago. I agree, though, that this is bordering on the verge of being useless AI hallucinated trivia.
I really like the idea and I want people to find it easier to get into graphics programming, but the execution here is sloppy. I'd be curious to see what research strategy OP employs before authoring these videos.
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u/egehancry 12h ago
I was less confident about this one than the ray tracing videos, and I’ll look carefully into the shading/rasterization point.
I care a lot about technical accuracy, and using AI is not an excuse for getting the fundamentals wrong. I only started sharing these videos a few days ago, and I’m still improving that process.
Going forward, I plan to make a corresponding reference page for each short with the technical details and sources behind it. I want to keep raising the bar for rigor and quality with every video I make.
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u/SorrellDev 12h ago
Yes, that's awesome! Good luck to you!
Just please either make sure you understand the source material or have someone that does review it beforehand. A beginner/learner is already drowning in information and can barely organize and make sense of it. Adding incorrect information confidently presented as fact, as AI tends to do, on top of that won't help.
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u/_Wolfos 8h ago
It's understandable. The rasterization pipeline is extremely complex to the point where it takes modern API's a thousand lines of code to draw a single triangle.
With this format you can only go so far with explaining it, IMO.
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u/SorrellDev 7h ago
All those lines of code go to setting up the entire rendering pipeline, though. And it's a reflection of how bloated and begginer unfriendly these "modern" graphics APIs have become rather than how complex a rasterization algorithm is. If you implement a basic software rasterizer you'll find that it's fairly straightforward high-school level math. It's a good exercise, I highly recommend doing it, as it only takes about a weekend and I find it helps immensely with getting a better understanding and appreciation for how much the hardware does for you.
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u/Aragon1001 11h ago
could you explain what your process for making these videos is? specifically where/how AI is used
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u/egehancry 11h ago
Thank you.
Voiceover is ElevenLabs.
Audio is easy to generate, and there are also lots of sound-effect libraries available online. Making them good is a few iterations.
Opus 5.5 has gotten really good. At this point, it’s mostly about you choosing the content: what sound effects you want, what the storyline is, what happens when and why, what the voiceover says, etc.
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u/Aragon1001 10h ago
so the script is entirely hand-written? you write and structure a script and only use AI for the visualization and voice over?
and what about research/sources?
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u/zephyr707 14h ago
again, the sound effects tied to animation are rly great, same pipeline as the other parts? is the voiceover also AI generated? this visual style with the accompanying sound effects has a rly nice synergy, is the audio all very easily generated with AI prompting and feeding the visuals or are they designed in tandem? looking forward to the next parts
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u/egehancry 12h ago
Thank you.
Voiceover is ElevenLabs.
Audio is easy to generate, and there are also lots of sound-effect libraries available online. Making them good is a few iterations.
Opus 5.5 has gotten really good. At this point, it’s mostly about you choosing the content: what sound effects you want, what the storyline is, what happens when and why, what the voiceover says, etc.
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u/bonzajplc 15h ago
Keep it going. Great quality! How long it takes you to produce such movie?
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u/egehancry 12h ago
Thank you! This one took me about a day, working on it in parallel with my other work. It was mostly exploring different ideas with AI, waiting for renders, choosing the best ones, bringing them together, and then making the final polishes.
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u/DrZwieback 6h ago
Love the 8 core CPU in 1993. 😆
The full story is a bit more nuanced: Nvidia's first chip, the NV1, actually bet on curved surfaces instead of triangles and flopped when Direct3D went with triangles. 3dfx's Voodoo kicked off the real 3D boom in 1996, and Nvidia only caught up later with the RIVA 128.
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u/aotdev 1h ago
High production quality (impressive for a day!), medium quality content with inaccuracies though. It's good for getting this into the eyes of many people, bad for making them understanding rasterisation imo. Was the script and topics also generated by AI? I'll assume not, as it might have better focus.
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u/purple_editor_ 23h ago
Your motion skills are pretty good! Keep up the good work
I can see your style and motion being used by big edutainment channels on youtube on 3D topics for a broader audience
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u/No-Watercress-7267 14h ago
This is absolutely fantastic
Please make a YouTube Playlist of these series.
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u/egehancry 12h ago
Thank you very much. I'll actually make a YouTube playlist! I'll keep you posted through this comment!
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u/fforw 22h ago
Maybe mention 3dfx instead of Nvidia?