Re: The entry competence level for graphics programmers

On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 3:32 PM, Tommy Brett <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I graduated 5 years ago with the intention of becoming a game developer, my career got sidetracked and although this sidetrack led to an ultimately comfortable existence and a lot of life lessons learned, I'm now at the point where my career as a Flash / Flex developer is stagnating. It may also be coming to a forced end as more and more of my employer's clients move away from Flash each month. I've been keeping up with the times, and doing a lot of graphics programming on the side using nVidia's CG shader programming language and OpenGL.

If you've got general programming experience, decent C/C++, an
understanding of lower level coding & knowledge of OpenGL/DirectX
you're already skilled enough to do a junior graphics programming
role. The only thing stopping you from a non-junior role would be
experience shipping products in that role.

> For example, I know that one area I lack skill in is using shader functions built for DirectX 10 and above - by virtue of me still using an XP machine (GPU is DX10 capable though, reeeally need to upgrade), and I suspect that not being knowledgeable about, say, tessellation using the GPU would swiftly kill any application I would make for a graphics programmer role that paid more than free lunches.

I don't think lack of a knowledge of a (rarely used in production
code) GPU feature matters at all. I've never used hardware
tesselation. DX11 (less so 10) experience would give you an easier
time of it, but not much compared to being able to demonstrate
knowledge and enthusiasm about general graphics programming
principles.

TomN
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