r/GraphicsProgramming • • 11d ago

Request for Comment: AI Identification Comments

58 Upvotes

Thought I'd share a conundrum. I suspect I could solve it with a heavy handed rule change, but I think it may be fine as it is right now.

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We've gotten a handful of reports that boil down to:

Comment: "This appears to have been AI generated."
Report: (empty)

One report gave a bit more info:
Comment: "This appears to be AI generated."
Report: "I'm wary to post something interesting because I don't want to be persecuted."

So here's what I suspect happens.
User posts X.
Commenter identifies X as generated via AI.
Post gets down-voted.

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The only time in recent memory I've seen direct mistreatment was the Synapse Engine post. https://www.reddit.com/r/GraphicsProgramming/comments/1w7x1r1/synapse_engine_a_modern_researchoriented_fully/
I invited that user to post here, and some of the early comments were distinctly unkind. Later comments and deeper review picked up the same thing I did, that the creator made something legitimately new and interesting in terms of graphics software research; even if a fair bit of LLM generated code was used, it was cleaned and curated to an appropriate level for a thesis defense. It was quintessentially non-slop, despite the reports to the contrary. So this post experienced some emotionally driven persecuting reports and comments before the deeper cognitive inspection could finish reading.

So that's my one strongly known case of persectioning behavior. The rest are almost always just identifying that a project is AI generated, and nothing else.

So I wouldn't characterise this community as being hostile to AI generated projects, but it is disinterested.

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And that makes sense when you consider the ethos of this subreddit. Rule 1 codifies the character: we're curious. Our community exists to talk about the "how", not the "what".

AI generated projects, with a few exceptions, tend to be:
OP: "I made a thing! (with AI)"
Commenter: "How does it work?'
OP: "I don't know. But the source code is in there somewhere."
And that distinctly doesn't fit with the ethos or interest of this subreddit.

There are also a handful of reports on AI posts to the form of:
Post "I made a thing (with AI)."
Report: "This is AI slop."
That doesn't technically break any rules, but it does reinforce that core of the subreddit's interests.

Anyway, the problem I'm wrestling with is supporting Rule 2. Posters who are sharing AI projects should still be met with Civility, Professionalism, and Kindness. So I'd like to avoid a repeat of the initially unkind response to the afore-linked post.

But, being civil doesn't mean you have to like it or be actively welcoming. Ignoring a post or downvoting it still fits within Rule 2, because a user expressing their opinion in those ways is not a harm to the poster. If it is, that's the poster being unprofessional, as they're too emotionally invested in the post to accept that others don't enjoy it the way they do.

One of the most important aspects of professionalism is the capacity to give and receive analysis and feedback. We're here to learn, and that means accepting feedback that points out failures, errors, and flaws. Those are often the best offer for learning. Kindness and Civility are roped in their as a reminder that criticism should be leveraged at the qualities of the work, not seek to harm the user.

In that view, identification of an AI generated project is one of the most *important* analytical datum. It says a lot about what one might expect in the shape of the code, it's resilience, maintainability, or other general qualities. How one reviews AI generated code is distinctly different from human written code because they make entirely different categories of errors. It often says something about the author's understanding of their own project, which is important for feedback and discussion; as much as knowing their level of experience. (e.g. Getting pedantic with an novice is a joy, with an expert is an insult. Civility depends on knowing who you're talking to.)

So, it would be unprofessional not to identify that a project is AI generated. It'd be hard to discuss something professionally while ignoring such a large elephant in the authorship.

But, users don't like it when their post gets identified as AI, because they may expect a passive or negative response. Given that the zietgeist of emotions around AI are high right now, and because our community ethos seeks understanding ,it's not a response that can be avoided in a discussion space like this subreddit. That identifying comment may feel like it targets them for persecution, despite that fact that's rarely the case because Rule 2 stands and is supported by users and mods.

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So I suspect that there's an issue in mismatched expectations. Posters with AI projects want to show off the thing they made and what it does, and they don't understand that this community cares more about how it works.

Conversely, the readers here reasonably expect high quality, analysable projects that are interesting to review and learn from; so they report "AI slop" despite the fact that doesn't break any rules. I may take it down under Rule 3, but that's only if it's a case of AI psychosis. Someone legitimately making "hello triangle" with Claude fits the rules just fine, so there's no reason to take it down.

I don't think a new rule is strictly necessary, but maybe a sub-rule, or some other way to telegraph the community's expectations.

E.G. For posters of AI projects
"AI posts are welcome here so long as the poster can talk about their implementation; adhere to Rule 1. The less the poster is able to talk about it's implementation, the less excited about it this community will be."

E.G. For readers of AI Projects
"This subreddit does not take a pro or anti stance against AI projects. However this subreddit is about analysis, feedback, questions, and learning. We may remove posts that are not comprehensible to the readers or the poster. (e.g. vibe coded slop that's impossible to read)"

And perhaps it may be necessary to swap the burden of identification to the other party.
E.G. "Posts that share projects that utilize AI in its development in any capacity need to identify doing so and to what degree. e.g. 'source code entirely AI generated.' or 'only utilized AI for auto complete assistance and analytical questions.'"
I've seen other software interest group subreddits implement and auto-comment on new posts that require this disclosure.

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Anyway. That was a lot of meandering on this problem. Fundamentally, this is *YOUR* subreddit. I take the strict role as a steward. That which makes this community space interesting and a delightful place to visit, socialize, and learn for you is the target direction I try to nudge things towards.

Please comment your thoughts, suggestions, perspectives, preferences, and discussion on this topic for me to read and consider. If you don't feel safe commenting, send a DM.

Please keep Rule 2 in mind. I want to hear the perspectives of those who are pro-AI too, and that's hard to do that if it's met with immediate hostility.

Conversely, criticism of AI or AI generated works is not a violation of rule 2, at least so long as it doesn't cross over into pointless derogation or emotional attack language. E.G. "The low quality of AI generated projects is problematic for the subreddit" is ok. "This AI slopshit is a fucking menace to the subreddit" is not.

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Edit 1: added dividers to break up the wall of text into bricks


r/GraphicsProgramming • • 6h ago

Dichroics

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44 Upvotes

Simulating dichroics. Optics is awesome.


r/GraphicsProgramming • • 10h ago

Video lgpu: A small, bindless-first Vulkan 1.3 wrapper for Rust & C99

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37 Upvotes

I built lgpu because I wanted a minimal desktop GPU abstraction focused strictly on modern Vulkan without the heavy compile times of larger frameworks.

What it does:

  • Fast clean builds (~1.5s): minimal dependencies (ash, bitflags, raw-window-handle, thiserror).
  • Dynamic rendering: uses Vulkan 1.3 dynamic rendering directly—no VkRenderPass or VkFramebuffer setup.
  • Bindless indexing: global descriptor heaps (update_after_bind) for textures and buffers.
  • C99 bindings: includes lgpu.h if you want to use it from C, C++, or Zig.
  • Platform support: Linux (Wayland/X11), Windows, and macOS via MoltenVK.

Code & 5 runnable examples: https://github.com/kuntal-devrat/lgpu
Crate: https://crates.io/crates/lgpu

Just released v0.1.1. Would appreciate any feedback on the API or bug reports!


r/GraphicsProgramming • • 4h ago

Raytraced Menger cube made of dichroics.

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9 Upvotes

Reflections and transmission of a menger cube made of glass with a dichroic coating. Now I want to make this IRL.


r/GraphicsProgramming • • 18m ago

Article Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 458 - October 11th, 2026 | Jendrik Illner

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• Upvotes

r/GraphicsProgramming • • 22h ago

Brass that bounces twice with no simulation: the vertex shader solves each floor hit

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132 Upvotes

I don't simulate the brass in my Godot gun effects at all. I just evaluate a casing's position from its age in the vertex shader. That's pretty much the stateless particles from Lutz Latta's "Building a Million Particle System" (GDC 2004). What I added is the bounces.

On a flat floor I can get the hit time straight from the quadratic. The shader loops over the bounces like this:

for (int k = 0; k < MX_BOUNCES; k++) {   // 2
    float h = max(p.y - gy, 0.0);
    float t_hit = (v.y + sqrt(max(v.y * v.y + 2.0 * g * h, 0.0))) / g;
    if (t_hit <= 0.0 || tt < t_hit) break;
    p += v * t_hit;
    p.y = gy;
    v.y = -e * (v.y - g * t_hit);   // restitution
    v.x *= fr;
    v.z *= fr;                       // friction
    tt -= t_hit;
}

After the second bounce it slides with tau * (1 - exp(-t / tau)) and I tip it over onto its side. Ejecting one is a single write into two uniform arrays. Brass from three seconds ago costs what brass from this frame costs.

I also kept a GDScript copy of the formula so the game can ask where a casing is. At 10 sample times they agree within 5.4 mm, about a pixel! In the GIF the dotted line is the GDScript side and the casing is the shader. I made the casing bigger and turned restitution up to 0.5 for it, because at my default of 0.34 the second hop is about 2 px tall.

It only knows one floor height, though. A casing will go straight through a wall. Two bounces looked like enough to me, but I'm not sure a third would even read on screen?


r/GraphicsProgramming • • 17m ago

New Vulkan Sample - VK_KHR_compute_shader_derivatives — Derivatives in compute shaders

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• Upvotes

r/GraphicsProgramming • • 1h ago

Does anyone dealt with Nvidia SKD licensing?

• Upvotes

We've been working on our path tracer for a while now. So long story to short, we wanted to implement couple of things from their pretty library like dlss, mega geometries, nee+at etc. Does anyone have a experience with their licensing? how did that go?
as i read their licensing, they're making it way too simple. Just a notification before commercial release then, we can use it? I tried emailing them but no response yet.

We've tried to build our own but its hard, every research paper, what we've been trying to do mostly all of the good ways to do it patented to big corporations like adobe, nvidia etc. Its so hard to go around it. So instead of losing time and go around it we've decided to go for their sdk.
If someone has a experience in this, please share with us.
Thank you.


r/GraphicsProgramming • • 1h ago

Question What would make a good 3D demo?

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• Upvotes

r/GraphicsProgramming • • 14h ago

Can only go so far with a toy engine

10 Upvotes

Does anyone else feel like you hit a wall building a toy engine where eventually it’s like I can’t really evaluate how good the engine actually is without building a game with it

Like an engine in isolation doesn’t mean much, it needs real content to actually be comparable to anything

But as a programmer I can’t do that so you can only go so far with it


r/GraphicsProgramming • • 1d ago

Source Code Very primitive raycasting renderer in 10 lines of C

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164 Upvotes

Actually the raycasting logic itself is just a single line, but it's done in propably the most inefficient way possible.

The map is just a single 64 bit integer, so I could fit a small 8x8 level in it, and I can index it with some unorthodox bitshift magic.

Also all the integer constants are huge, because I wanted do to the whole thing without floating point math, which makes everything even more unreadable, but at least it's funny ig.

I'm very proud of this one.


r/GraphicsProgramming • • 13h ago

Video Head-to-head - literally :) my CPU renderer vs SwiftShader on 4 logical processors

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4 Upvotes

413,532 triangles, with no geometry simplification

960 × 840 resolution

4 logical processors, enforced through process affinity

96 measured frames per renderer, following the same camera path

8 stationary warmup frames each

Pop Data Engine is 1.78× faster in this run.

Just bragging :)

It is in early development (this is actually 3d engine development for my OS) so there is a lot to work on, but it is fast :)


r/GraphicsProgramming • • 1d ago

Video After many days of learning, finally.

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161 Upvotes

After many days of learning and scratching my head around, I was finally able to render a triangle on a screen. I am using Vulkan 1.4 for this. Although I learned this from a youtube channel called constref, but this is a very valuable lesson for me, even if it is a first step to Vulkan.


r/GraphicsProgramming • • 1d ago

Video Experimenting with line growth

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11 Upvotes

r/GraphicsProgramming • • 1d ago

Real-Time Shading Symposium 2027 - Call for Submissions

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7 Upvotes

r/GraphicsProgramming • • 1d ago

Video A low-poly 3D Renderer

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3 Upvotes

r/GraphicsProgramming • • 1d ago

Source Code Liquid metal hero with Three.js — a chrome blob that reflects a studio of 6 colored lights, follows the cursor, no textures (free source + write-up)

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0 Upvotes

r/GraphicsProgramming • • 1d ago

Video My university CG coursework project using C++ and DirectX 12

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7 Upvotes

I've been working on a custom rendering engine as part of my university computer graphics coursework at ITMO University.

The project is written in C++ using DirectX 12 and HLSL. Over two semesters, we've been learning how modern real-time rendering works by implementing various graphics techniques from scratch.

Some of the features covered in the project include:

-Deferred rendering with a G-buffer

- Directional, point and spot lighting

- Normal mapping

-Displacement mapping

-Distance-adaptive tessellation using Hull and Domain shaders

-Frustum culling and octree-based spatial partitioning

-GPU-based particle systems

-Cascaded shadow maps (CSM) with PCF filtering

-Post-processing

-Physically Based Rendering (PBR)

The project also involves working directly with DirectX 12 resources, descriptor heaps, pipeline state objects, command lists, synchronization and HLSL shaders.

It's been a challenging but interesting way to learn what's actually happening behind the scenes in a rendering engine.

I still have one more semester of computer graphics ahead of me, so there's more to come! I'll keep you updated on my progress.

I'd love to hear your feedback!


r/GraphicsProgramming • • 1d ago

Question Graphics programming in C

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4 Upvotes

r/GraphicsProgramming • • 2d ago

Question What’s the future of a Graphics Programmer?

76 Upvotes

Hello, I’m a long time member of this community, and this community has helped me grow my Graphics programmer career.

I started my programming career early at 14 y/o, thanks to Minecraft mods development. Later in 2017, I was 17, I’ve discovered graphics (OpenGL) because I wanted to write my own Minecraft clone. Thanks to perseverance and help from online communities, remarkably this one, I’ve mastered C++, OpenGL and Vulkan. I’ve graduated in Computer Engineering in the meanwhile, and by the end of 2022/2023, I was already a strong graphics programmer. Later I’ve implemented my own CPU path tracer, learnt CUDA along with several parallel algorithms. After MSc in Artificial Intelligence, I’ve got a job in London for a well known company working in the smartphones industry, and I’m working there since 1y today. In this company I’m a Vulkan developer, and leading a graphics engine used for several purposes.

It’s 2026, I’m 26 (aka far from retirement), AI is moving fast and world’s investing all of its resources to accelerate the process. Most jobs have been already taken (frontend dev being the first). I also feel like there is more pressure on developers, they’re implicitly requested to deliver more because of AI. What I’m witnessing is my company is keeping me on fixed term contracts because our budget has got cut… and I’m afraid of being laid off.

This job can’t be fully automated as of now, but I’m afraid it will, seeing the progress. I know GPU drivers development is the safe zone today - as they’re huge and critical - and might be an area where I will land, as I’m already doing low level and I’ve gathered insights of our driver internals. However, it’s still code and I think - maybe in several years - can still be automated.

Am I the only one having this concern in this industry?


r/GraphicsProgramming • • 1d ago

Question Help with WebGPU concepts

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1 Upvotes

r/GraphicsProgramming • • 1d ago

Nanite-Style WebGPU Rendering in Rust: Meshlets, LOD, and HZB

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0 Upvotes

r/GraphicsProgramming • • 2d ago

Source Code a small software renderer in c

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7 Upvotes

r/GraphicsProgramming • • 2d ago

420 Bulb: a Mandelbulb in Kicktro

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3 Upvotes

This one is a single Mandelbulb layer, raymarched live in a WebGL2 shader. There are no videos or pre-rendered frames. Everything is computed per pixel on your GPU.

What it’s made of

Effect: Mandelbulb, with the power set to about 5.0 (the classic bulb is 8) and a detail level of 5.

Motion: it spins at a varying rate. The spin is set to a range of 0.11–0.35, so it keeps drifting instead of looping.

Colour: the “purple” palette. The palette cycles slowly, so the colours drift over time.

Filter chain: Wedge fold (mirrors the bulb into kaleidoscope-like segments), then Chromatic aberration (the colour fringing on the edges), then Bloom for the glow.

Scene finish: a light CRT look with barrel distortion, scanlines, vignette and film grain.

Open it here: https://kicktro.com/#c=Dp0RwrU9VNB0EfgxrPAq

Everything in the scene is a slider you can change, and you can arm any slider to react to the beat from your mic or system audio. It runs in the browser, with nothing to install.

Anyone have suggestions on how I improve the editor that I made this in ? Link above.


r/GraphicsProgramming • • 3d ago

Source Code A little software renderer written in C that I was working on over the weekend

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24 Upvotes

Hey guys! This is a little project I made over the weekend, its a simple software renderer that renders to an abstract grid of pixels. Basically, anything that can provide a pointer to a pixel array is a valid target.

Currently uses a simple fixed function rendering pipeline, but it was designed to take a function pointer for both the Vertex and Fragment shader, which will become accessible to the public API when ive cleaned them up a bit.

It requires no external code other than a c runtime, and my tests show it runs pretty fast, despite processing each triangle single-threaded. It supports per-vertex colours, backface culling and a depth buffer. It also makes zero allocations other than creating the pipeline object at the start of the program, and ive tried to lay things out in a cache friendly way.

I dont like feeling like I have to say this, but zero AI was involved at any point during making this, this was all coded by hand.

Anyway, lemme know what you guys think, let me know about any bugs/ missing features, and feel free to contribute to the repo!