See the image. Understand the GPU. Build the renderer.

Name every part of a rendered image.

Image & pixel

An image is a grid of tiny coloured squares called pixels.

Frame

One finished picture. Games draw 30–120 of them every second.

Mesh

A 3D shape made of little triangles.

Camera

Decides what part of the world you see and from where.

Texture & material

A texture is a picture wrapped on a shape; a material says how that surface reacts to light.

Shader & GPU

A shader is a tiny program that runs millions of times on the GPU, once per vertex or pixel.

Only the maths needed for the next visual result.

Vectors

An arrow: a direction and a length.

Dot product

Tells how much two arrows point the same way — that's how bright a surface is.

Cross product

Gives an arrow that sticks straight out of two others.

Matrices & transforms

A recipe that moves, turns and resizes objects.

Interpolation

Smoothly blending between two values.

Rays

A line shot from the camera to find what it hits.

Follow one triangle to one pixel.

Vertex processing

Every corner of every triangle is moved to its place on screen.

Rasterization

The GPU works out which pixels each triangle covers.

Fragment shading

Each covered pixel gets its colour computed.

Depth & blending

Closer things hide farther ones; see-through things mix colours.

Post-processing

Final touch-ups on the whole picture, like glow or colour grading.

Make light behave correctly.

Linear vs sRGB

Screens store colour bent to suit our eyes; lighting maths needs it straight.

Exposure & HDR

Real light can be far brighter than a screen can show.

Tone mapping

Squeezes very bright light into what the screen can show.

Diffuse & specular

Matte glow vs shiny highlight.

Metal & roughness

Metals tint their reflections; rough surfaces blur them.

Solid colour → ray marching.

Solid colour & UVs

Start by painting everything one colour, then use UVs as a gradient.

Normals & lighting

Use which way the surface faces to light it.

Procedural patterns

Draw patterns with maths instead of pictures.

Ray marching

Step along a ray until it hits a shape described by a formula.

Remove work — and measure what removing it costs.

Frame budget

Everything must fit in 16.7 ms to hit 60 FPS.

Draw calls & state

Every 'draw this' command costs the CPU time.

Overdraw

Painting the same pixel many times wastes GPU time.

Frustum culling

Skip objects the camera can't see.

Occlusion / Hi-Z

Skip objects hidden behind others.

Meshlets

Cut meshes into small pieces and skip pieces nobody sees.

Where light doesn't reach, and where it bounces.

Shadow maps

Draw the scene from the light; anything farther than what the light sees is in shadow.

Shadow acne & peter-panning

Too little correction makes stripes; too much makes shadows float.

Ambient occlusion

Corners and creases get less light.

Baked lighting

Work out lighting once and save it into textures.

Real-time GI

Bouncing light computed live every frame.

Ray-traced effects

Real rays for sharp reflections and exact shadows.

Know how whole renderers are organised.

Forward vs deferred

Light each object as you draw it, or save surface info and light it all at once.

Transparency

See-through things are hard: they must be drawn back to front.

Anti-aliasing

Smooths jaggy edges.

Bloom, DOF, motion blur

Camera effects that make images feel real.

Render graph

A plan of all rendering passes so the engine can schedule them.

How the hardware and Vulkan/DX12 really work.

SIMT & warps

The GPU runs groups of 32–64 threads doing the same step.

Memory hierarchy

Nearby memory is fast, far memory is slow.

Mobile tile GPUs

Phones draw the screen square by square to save power.

Explicit APIs

Vulkan and DirectX 12 let you control everything — and make you responsible for it.

GPU-driven rendering

The GPU decides what to draw instead of the CPU.

Where AI meets rendering.

Neural upscaling

Render small, let AI make it look big and sharp.

NeRFs

A network that learns a 3D scene from photos.

Gaussian splatting

A scene made of millions of soft blobs, fast enough for real time.

Denoising

Cleaning noisy ray-traced images.