Top all-time · #1099
Adrian Courrèges
Personal blog · adriancourreges.com/bloggamesprogramming
Adrian Courrèges's personal blog at adriancourreges.com covers games and programming. Since 2015, 61 different Hacker News readers have linked it 74 times, most often “GTA V – Graphics Study”. The last post was in 2020, but the archive is still widely read.
Often recommended · 16 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Adrian Courrèges' graphics studies, which break down how games such as GTA V, DOOM (2016) and Deus Ex render a frame. Commenters point to them as a series for learning modern game rendering.
- Recommended for · 16 comments
- Called fantastic, excellent, mind expanding and a great list; commenters say to read the graphics studies.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Projects UE4 Optimized Post-Effects Metal Gear Solid V - Graphics Study DOOM (2016) - Graphics Study GTA V - Graphics Study Supreme Commander - …
Most-linked posts?
- GTA V – Graphics Study14 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2015-11-02
- How Doom 2016 Renders a Frame11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2016-09-09
- Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Graphics Study4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-03-11
- Graphics Studies Compilation4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-02-24
- Doom (2016) Graphics Study4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-12-13
- Metal Gear Solid V – Graphics Study4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-12-15
- Supreme Commander – Graphics Study3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-06-24
- Graphics Studies Compilation3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-01-04
- GTA V – Graphics Study3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-04-02
- /blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study-part-3/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-11-02
What Hacker News says?
They did some good stuff: http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphic... And just thinking about the size of the game and popularity, to make it work at all, requires some skill. Which makes the OP even more unbelievable.
Comment linking /blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study/
on “How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%”Submitted Beware of Transparent Pixels as a story · 567 points
HN discussionGraphics programming analysis done using examples written in WebGL–genius. Hypertext that takes full advantage of the medium. This reminds me of something I'd see on https://pudding.cool/ , but it goes far more in depth than anything there. Absolutely fantastic article. I've been using MSAAx4 in my rendering engine for some time and only recently have considered switching to a FXAA / TAA implementation. I'm actually…
Comment linking /blog/
on “AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing”Submitted GTA V – Graphics Study as a story · 516 points
HN discussionDrawing cubes is basically one of the first things you do when starting with 3d rendering. Shaders are scripts that the GPU uses for translating your input (a cube in 3d data and your 'camera' and some more vectors) to viewport/screen coordinates. You can do a lot with it [0]. The classic OpenGL 1 framework had no shaders and a static pipeline. Its straightforward in doing things but reduces the amount of fancy thin…
Comment linking /blog/2016/09/09/doom-2016-graphics-study/
on “Craft: A simple Minecraft clone written in C using OpenGL shaders”Submitted How Doom 2016 Renders a Frame as a story · 487 points
HN discussionDOOM (2016) - Graphics Study http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2016/09/09/doom-2016-gra... GTA V - Graphics Study http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphic...
Comment linking /blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study/
on “Wind Waker Graphics Analysis”Submitted Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Graphics Study as a story · 346 points
HN discussionHe calls out Renderdoc for picking out rendering internals in the third part of the series: http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphic... You can poke around D3D11 and OGL games, though I haven't tried out the OGL functionality. Next-gen api support is coming as well. If you've poked around other engines, either via debuggers or actual engine development, you actually run into a lot of the same con…
Comment linking /blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study-part-3/
on “GTA V – Graphics Study”Submitted Metal Gear Solid V – Graphics Study as a story · 244 points
HN discussionThis is the third game that the author has dissected. The previous two are also very nice :) http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/06/23/supreme-comma... http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/03/10/deus-ex-human...
Comment linking /blog/2015/03/10/deus-ex-human-revolution-graphics-study/
on “GTA V – Graphics Study”Submitted Supreme Commander – Graphics Study as a story · 162 points
HN discussionI think mostly because having scads of clever conditionals all over the place greatly increases the risk of subtle and hard-to-reproduce bugs. From a 2007 Carmack email [1] : > The way we have traditionally measured performance and optimized our games encouraged a lot of conditional operations -- recognizing that a particular operation doesn't need to be done in some subset of the operating states, and skipping it.…
Comment linking /blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study/
on “Making Advanced GUI Applications with Godot”Submitted Supreme Commander Graphics Study (2015) as a story · 133 points
HN discussionYou can combine SSAO with (very coarse) global illumination probes to achieve a very convincing effect. DOOM (2016) is a good example of this: http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2016/09/09/doom-2016-gra... SSAO has been overused/applied poorly (just like the brown 'bloom'/color grading effect in mid-2000s games), which is why people often dislike it.
Comment linking /blog/2016/09/09/doom-2016-graphics-study/
on “Announcing Microsoft DirectX Raytracing”Submitted GTA V – Graphics Study (2015) as a story · 126 points
HN discussionThis article is mind expanding if you want to understand what happens on just the graphics side of things in a modern game: http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2016/09/09/doom-2016-gra... Bear in mind everything that's not included in this analysis: AI, mesh deformation, level logic, player mechanics, enemy mechanics, all the lower level stuff and so many things I haven't even thought of.
Comment linking /blog/2016/09/09/doom-2016-graphics-study/
on “Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 engineering firefighter”Submitted Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Graphics Study as a story · 12 points
HN discussionGTA's tone mapping is discussed at http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphic... - including a couple of interesting "filmic tone mapping" links
Comment linking /blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphics-study/
on “Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping”Submitted Metal Gear Solid V – Graphics Study as a story · 4 points
HN discussionDefinitely agree about “juicing” your game, especially from a visual perspective. There’s so many graphics concepts that I didn’t know about and didn’t have the eye to recognize. Things like ambient occlusion, bloom, reflection probes, and physically based rendering/materials were totally unknown to me but were really essential to making a game look “AAA”. Adrian Courreges has a great list of graphics studies that e…
Comment linking /blog/2020/12/29/graphics-studies-compilation/
on “Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer”Submitted GTA V Graphics Study (2015) as a story · 4 points
HN discussionYou'll probably be quite disappointed, because it's most likely the same mess as any other multi-million-line codebase ;) IMHO frame rendering analyses like this: http://www.adriancourreges.com/projects/ ...or working through GDC presentations, blog posts and whitepapers from those companies is more helpful to understand their technology. (edit: better link)
Comment linking /projects/
on “CD Projekt Red has been subject to a cyber attack and ransom demand”Submitted GTA V – Graphics Study as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe Kawase approach is from 2005, and GPU performance has improved a ton since then. Some of the newer games do use Bokeh blurs with multiple depths of field. The result can look much more natural than the Gaussian stuff. BTW, it's not just a cinematic effect -- the fact that our pupils are round means that like cameras, they act as a disk-shaped filter for things that are out of focus. Here's a breakdown of how Doo…
Comment linking /blog/2016/09/09/doom-2016-graphics-study/
on “Video Game Blurs (and how the best one works)”Submitted DOOM (2016) – Graphics Study as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIf you're interested in what modern game engines do to display a frame, I highly recommend following studies: GTA V: http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/11/02/gta-v-graphic... Supreme Commander: http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/06/23/supreme-comma... Deus Ex: http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2015/03/10/deus-ex-human... HN Discussion about GTA V: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10492876
Comment linking /blog/2015/03/10/deus-ex-human-revolution-graphics-study/
on “Show HN: OpenGL in super slow motion – visualising Z-buffering”Submitted Graphics Studies Compilation as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIf you like this, you'll also like the "Graphics Study" articles of https://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/
Comment linking /blog/
on “Reverse engineering the rendering of The Witcher 3 (2018)”Submitted Graphics Studies Compilation as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
