deko3d VS tinyrenderer

If you just want a low level graphics api, and you don’t care about some of the abstractions Vulkan offers, you might consider checking out Deko 3D. It’s a stripped down version of Vulkan for the NVidia Tegra X1

That's not exactly correct. This is register maps for the 3d engine (also called class), what you describe would be closer to the shader ISA.

In driver code you'll see them building command buffers that set registers in those classes to certain values. It could be the RGBA values of the clear color, or a virtual address in the GPU space.

This documents the names of these registers. This makes reverse engineering somewhat easier as you don't really have to guess anymore. But in most cases it was pretty clear from the start, and for some generations those were already well documented by open source efforts. One of best known gens is probably Maxwell since it was used in the Nintendo Switch, see for instance [1] (or code in yuzu/Ryujinx) which is the equivalent of those headers NV published.

However this isn't a very big step in documenting their GPUs. The exact functions of those registers aren't explained, but most importantly the shader ISA isn't documented at all, which is essential to build a good open-source driver.

Source: I have reverse engineered some driver code for Maxwell (and used similar headers to write drivers for nvdec and nvjpg).

[1] https://github.com/devkitPro/deko3d/blob/master/source/maxwe...

They're 100% wrong. There are homebrew emulators that work on the switch just fine and have GPU access and there's also things like this: https://github.com/devkitPro/deko3d

Unfortunately not much info is publicly available about it. Recently a homebrew rendering API was released that builds upon reverse engineering efforts: https://github.com/devkitPro/deko3d.

C++: How OpenGL works: software rendering in 500 lines of code

I don’t think that exists (I sure would like for it to), but until it does you could amuse yourself with:

- A 500-line (non-OpenGL-compatible) 3D rasterizer: https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer/wiki.

- A “hello Wayland” app written in C without libwayland or anything else: https://gaultier.github.io/blog/wayland_from_scratch.html.

- A “hello X11” app written in x86-64 assembly(!) without libX11, libxcb, or anything else: https://gaultier.github.io/blog/x11_x64.html.

the tinyrenderer[1] project has been on my todos forever now. glad to see the author is writing more self-paced programming projects.

[1]: https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer

- Game development - Unity3D project based learning in C#: https://learn.unity.com/ - Graphics - There was another user on r/GraphicsProgramming the other day (who teaches Computer Graphics at his university) that linked their lecture series for the entry year of their course here: https://tamats.com/learn/realtime-graphics/ - Project based learning: https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer/wiki - Rendering API tutorials: https://vulkan-tutorial.com/, https://learnopengl.com/

There are a couple of excellent resources out there for implementing 3D rendering from scratch.

On that I cannot recommend enough is this github repo:

https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer/wiki/Lesson-0:-getting...

If you are more of a visual learner, this guy is also a treasure trove:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih20l3pJoeU

Other people have mentioned ray-tracing in one weekend

If anyone is really interested in graphics I would also recommend TinyRenderer

https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer/wiki

This one is a CPU-based rasterizing renderer

Its good if you want to get a good understanding of what a GPU does underneath

I was in a similar position to you, and I first did this https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer/wiki

Yes, my thoughts exactly, shader!=program on GPU. It's just a code which calculates pixel color or pixel position. See for example this: https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer/blob/master/main.cpp. It's not GLSL or anything uploadable to GPU yet it's still a shader.

In terms of a project which would be worthwhile, I think building a software rasterizer from scratch is a useful first step. TinyRenderer is a great place to start. Looking at the high level overview of many graphics subjects, ScratchAPixel is a valuable resource. Theres also just great information in some of the rote graphics programming textbooks (Michael Abrash's Black Book fully available online from Jason Gregory, and this book is really interesting). The "RayTracer in a weekend" series is also (seemingly) very illuminating (no pun intended).