A case for learning GPU programming with a compute-first mindset – Maister's Gr

Summary

Beginners coming into our little corner of the programming world have it rough. Normal CPU-centric programming tends to start out with a “Hello World” sample, which can be completed in mere minutes. It takes far longer to simply download the toolchains and set them up. If you’re on a developer friendly OS, this can be completed in seconds as well. However, in the graphics world, young whippersnappers cut their teeth at rendering the elusive “Hello Triangle” to demonstrate that yes, we can indeed do what our forebears accomplished 40 years ago, except with 20x the effort and 100000x the performance. There’s no shortage of examples of beginners rendering a simple triangle (or a cube), and with the new APIs having completely displaced the oxygen of older APIs, there is a certain expectation of ridiculous complexity and raw grit required to tickle some pixels on the display. 1000 lines of code, two weeks of grinding, debugging black screens etc, etc. Something is obviously wrong here, and it’s not going to get easier. I would argue that trying to hammer through the brick wall of graphics is the wrong approach in 2025. Graphics itself is less and less relevant for any hopeful new GPU programmer. Notice I wrote “GPU programmer”, not graphics programmer, because most interesting work these days happens with compute shaders, not traditional “graphics” rendering. Instead, I would argue we should start teaching compute with a debugger/profiler first mindset, building up the understanding of how GPUs execute code, and eventually introduce the fixed-function rasterization pipeline as a specialization once all the fundamentals are already in place. The raster pipeline was simple enough to teach 20 years ago, but those days are long gone, and unless you plan to hack on pre-historic games as a hobby project, it’s an extremely large API surface to learn. When compute is the focus, there’s a lot of APIs we could ponder, like CUDA and OpenCL, but I think Vulkan compute is the best co...