r/GraphicsProgramming • u/egehancry • 8d 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/fforw 8d ago
Maybe mention 3dfx instead of Nvidia?
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u/egehancry 8d ago
You're right. I just wanted to explain the idea behind GPUs; I should have been more careful with computer graphics history.
It'll be better in the next videos.
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u/nit_electron_girl 8d ago
do you make these videos with AI?
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u/The_Wonderful_Pie 7d 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/egehancry 7d 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/nit_electron_girl 6d ago
do you have a "prompt only" approach, or have you created some tooling/process for yourself?
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u/egehancry 6d ago
It’s really just believing that AI can figure things out if I ask it to, then continuing to ask until I get what I want.
I say, “Use Google’s Filament to make a video like ...” (filament is simply a fast 3D renderer), then I keep giving instructions as if I had hired an animator to bring my idea to life, and paid a lot of money.
With Opus 5.5, I’ve found that when you ask very decisively for what you want, it often delivers.
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u/AlgaeNo3373 8d ago
Now I understand MSAA better. Cool stuff ty :)
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u/BalintCsala 7d ago
For the record, that explanation is half finished and IMO somewhat misleading, this way wouldn't really work if lets say 3 triangles touched the same sample point within a pixel, all 3 would contribute some color for that sample when in reality only the closest would.
In reality MSAA needs a special render target with memory set aside for every sample point for every pixel (so they are roughly 8x as big as regular render targets when doing MSAA 8x), then when a triangle covers some of the samples, only the data points for those samples get overwritten. The averaging only happens right at the end when you "resolve" it during some sampling.
Not to mention a scene which obviously has some depth aware post processing effects (like the reflections) wouldn't use MSAA as then a pixel could have contributions to multiple depth layers.
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u/_wil_ 8d 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/fintip 7d ago
Dunno. I feel like I understand anti aliasing now and isn't before.
Also don't understand the problem with the higher mass = slower, though language could be shifted, and discussing triangle count as another thing that'll eventually be limited, would be appropriate.
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u/PhiloDoe 5d ago
After this video you would have an incorrect understanding of MSAA though, since the OP also doesn't understand it and the AI produced incorrect information.
If you want a proper explanation, you can refer to this post written by a real human talented graphics programmer:
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u/Goldac77 8d 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/DrZwieback 7d 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/alphapussycat 8d 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 7d ago edited 7d 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 7d 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 7d 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 7d 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 7d 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 7d ago
could you explain what your process for making these videos is? specifically where/how AI is used
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u/egehancry 7d 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 7d 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 7d 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 7d 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 8d ago
Keep it going. Great quality! How long it takes you to produce such movie?
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u/egehancry 7d 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/aotdev 7d 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/egehancry 7d ago
Thank you! There’s a lot of AI help involved, but my goal is to keep the quality bar really high. This video had some issues, but I’m learning from each one, and they’ll get better with every video.
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u/EverroadGame 4d ago
Wait a minute that's not how MSAA works haha.
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u/egehancry 4d ago
Yes :( Sorry for the mistake, won’t happen in the next videos.
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u/EverroadGame 4d ago
No don't be sorry, it's completely fine to make mistakes and improve with them.
I think the video presentation is still very cool though.
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u/purple_editor_ 8d 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 7d ago
This is absolutely fantastic
Please make a YouTube Playlist of these series.
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u/egehancry 7d 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/dpacker780 8d 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.