graphicsguy

RenderDoc for debugging graphics

Imgui for tool UI

I worked remotely for the first 2 years of the pandemic. It was fine at first but when I switched teams and no longer knew everybody from before the pandemic, the social loss started to wear on me. It's not like we had social meetings on my old team, but I think I was able to pretend better or something when I knew everyone in real life.

I also started to struggle to stop working and I hated that and hated the space occupied by my workstation.

I also have a lot of equipment (console dev kits in games industry) and it takes up a lot of precious space.

For all those reasons I'm back in the office 100%. Also I prefer to collaborate in person in my job (it's much easier to hash things out with an artist in person).

Still, there are some things that are permanently changed in ways that make me sad. There will always be some remote folks, so every meeting must be remote accessible (and rightly so), which means we still have to sit on zoom calls a lot of the time. Also zoom has lowered the friction to having a meeting, so we end up having way more meetings.

I don't begrudge the WFHers. I want everyone to have what they want and be happy, and particularly for the parents out there, the saved commute time and flexible hours are a godsend.

Also if you branch on a GPU, the compiler has to reserve enough registers to walk through both branches (handwavey), which means lower occupancy.

Often you have no choice, or removing the branch leaves you with just as much code so it's irrelevant. But sometimes it matters. If you know that a particular draw call will always use one side of the branch but not the other, a typical optimization is to compile a separate version of the shader that removes the unused branch and saves on registers

Pointers also allow you to do fun and dangerous things like casting between types!

For example, if you're implementing your own memory allocator, at the base level your allocator only really cares about how many bytes are being requested (along with alignment, offset, other things) so you'd probably just implement it to return a char*, u8*, or void* pointing to the blob of memory you allocated with new, malloc, or whatever scheme you've cooked up. The calling code or higher level allocator code could then cast it to the actual type

RenderDoc is made by one person. It's used by every graphics programmer. It's free, open source, faster + better than anything else. I love it.