graphicsguy
Great stuff. I find it really funny that a big feature of modern API’s is that applications place barriers instead of being handled by the driver, and we all tried it for a while and then threw up our hands and decided to write graph systems to automatically place them because it was too hard.
I like to not think of anything as “absolute” or “dealbreaker” (within reason. If there’s a culture of harassment I’m gone, for example). But spend intentional time throughout your career reflecting on what matters to you in terms of team culture, code culture, career growth opportunities, compensation, etc. There are a lot of factors to being happy in your work, and a lot of ways to get there. Be intentional about it, and try to always move toward it. It matters a lot more than whatever software you’re writing.
Graphics Programmer here.
More likely you would just write data to a buffer (basically an array of whatever element type you want) rather than a render target and then read it back to the cpu. Dx, vulkan, etc. all have APIs to upload / download to / from the GPU quite easily, and CUDA makes it even easier, so a simple compute shader or CUDA kernel that writes to a buffer would make the most sense for general purpose computation like an advent of code problem.
As a graphics programmer in the games industry, it’s always exciting to me when people discover how much fun all this stuff is
You’re right that it’s messy and imperfect and false positives can be really frustrating.
But the alternative - no efforts to maintain a safe space - is that vulnerable people are typically the target. Toxicity typically punches down.
I’ll happily trade some clunky inconvenience so that those people can safely participate
My broken brain just goes “but how would a decompressor know if ‘3101’ was originally ‘30’ or 101 '3’s in a row?”
RenderDoc for debugging graphics
Imgui for tool UI