"Graphics programmers" are historically some of the highest paid and hardest to hire programmers in gamedev. But they're probably less of a thing in the age of Unity and Unreal.
Yea, nobody needs a "graphics programmer" unless they're making their own game engine.
In the mobile world very few companies bother. If they do, they're either so old that Unity mobile wasn't very good and already have their own engine or they're doing something niche where Unity doesn't make sense.
Everyone else just uses Unity and Unreal, because trying to launch a new game is hard enough without having to build everything from scratch.
This isn't true at all. You can possibly get away without a graphics programmer on those platforms due to the immense market of graphics techniques available due to... graphics programmers publishing them.
There's a ton of shader development happening. Optimizing the graphics stack takes some specialization.
> due to the immense market of graphics techniques available due to... graphics programmers publishing them
Depends on how one defines “graphics programmer”. Those people are arguably more “tech artists” than “graphics programmers”.
Lots of people can write clever shaders in node graphs. Those folks are usually more “tech artist”. Although the line between “graphics programmer” and “tech artist” is very very very fuzzy.
Not to mention graphics is way harder then web. Let's be honest... Web, which encompasses frontend and backend is significantly easier then graphics programming.
Web programming is incredibly easy in general, and gets even easier every year. Game programming is much harder in my experience. Game Engine programming is not even comparable.
You mean creating a HTML/CSS website is easy in general. Because you can also develop games on the web and create whatever complex kind of application you can think of. Best to be precise when saying these things.
It depends. If you're implementing something like K8s or Spark it's just as hard as a rendering engine, and you only need one K8s and one rendering engine. These days unity, unreal, or Blender can't really be beat.
If you're just working on top of a platform, it's trivial for sure.
No spark and k8s are configuration problems. Hard but you are not creating the tool, just configuring it. It's more of a dev ops /sys admin thing and, though I agree it's very hard, it's a very left field comparison IMO.
With engine creation you are creating the tool. It's programming through and through.
Though I can see how a lot of backend people are taking on the role of "configuring" stuff so it's hard to delineate backend programming away from it completely.
Still even when taking this into account, it is of my opinion that a rendering engine is significantly harder then even K8s or spark.
You are right though that with existing game engines graphics programmers are not as needed anymore.
> Hard but you are not creating the tool, just configuring it. It's more of a dev ops /sys admin thing and, though I agree it's very hard, it's a very left field comparison IMO.
They specifically are talking about creating the tool.
They're talking about the developers working on spark and K8? That's different. But I don't think they are talking about that. They are more likely talking about using these tools.
Easier in terms of less math for sure, but there is still plenty of complexity with web. Async, constantly changing environment, and specific device quirks to name a few.
I've done both. Graphics programming is significantly harder. It's both harder to program for and harder to learn. Make no mistake, they are different, but in terms of challenge, Web is trivial compared to it.
You'll get a lot more people in Highschool who know Web simply because of how accessible and easy it is and a lot less people in Highschool who know how to create a physically correct rendering engine or a realtime graphics engine. It is brutally harder.
Render programmers are not all that well paid, but they are absurdly hard to hire for.
The highest paid IC's at my last few companies (gamedev) were people that had been there 20 years (He was AI programmer) or the infrastructure people running the gameservers and multiplayer backend.
That might seem weird. But it's hard to hire infra people as they can work basically anywhere and will have as much enjoyment.
Render programmers can work in CAD or Games, there's much less demand, and they tend to want to work in games.
Cloud infrastructure/devops, data analytics, backend code, data storage all need people especially in mobile games.