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Comment by vjk800 | Hacker News Reader

Is there something of practical value you can do nowadays if you know about shaders and all this low level graphics stuff?

I'm under impression that if I want to make an actual game, it makes no sense to do any of this stuff myself because the many existing game engines do it much better and faster out of the box and all the possible style choices in graphics are abstracted away into parameters in the engine.

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>Is there something of practical value you can do nowadays if you know about shaders and all this low level graphics stuff?

Learning something new is always worthwhile, even if you have no immediate practical usecase for that knowledge.

Also, neither Unity or Unreal are a drop in replacement for shader programming. If you want to do anything advanced you'll need to get your hands dirty rolling your own GLSL/HLSL.

That's a good point, but I think very often people still have hard time creating effects they want. For example good few years ago I published few shaders on Unity Asset Store (like https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/fragmentat...) and there were quite a lot of purchases (and still are sometimes).

My point is, you can create more complex effects and provide them as a tool/out of the box effect (wrapper)

Games typically have custom shaders.

But this is more than just games. Shaders are how you program a GPU. There are plenty of use cases.

If your goal is to just make a game, then sure, there’s probably not a huge gain in learning low-level graphics.

But the reason existing game engines already do it better is because well… there’s still people out there who learn low-level graphics and maintain / improve those engines. Right?

Even simplest (in terms of graphics) 2D games like Balatro have custom shaders today. It's an extremely valuable, and commonly applied skill set among game devs.

> game engines... all the possible style choices

Nah. Nope. Never happens.

Game engines might have node-based shader editors, but they're roughly as low-level as GLSL.

Honestly I don't even know whether I'd call GLSL shaders "low-level." When I hear of low-level graphic code I'd imaging one's talking about managing pipeline state objects manually or something.

Shaders are not some hidden rendering pipeline technicality you can abstract away and forget about. Even if you don't write raw shader code you still need to use something like a shader graph for most games, or you will be very limited.

Many art styles are achieved by writing a small handful of shaders by hand.

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