How do Video Game Graphics Work?

An animated explanation of how GPUs render 3D scenes, covering the graphics pipeline, ray tracing, and DLSS.

Go to brilliant.org/BranchEducation/ for a 30-day free trial and expand your knowledge. The first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium membership. Have you ever wondered how video game graphics have become incredibly realistic? How can GPUs and graphics cards render such incredibly detailed scenes? Well, in this video we're going to explore how just a bunch of data in your computer gets turned into realistic graphics. Additionally, we'll take a quick look into Ray Tracing, DLSS or Deep Learning Super Sampling, and many other complicated aspects of video game graphics. We at Branch Education love to play video games, so this video has been one of our favorite ones to make thus far. It's kind of like getting to look under the hood of your childhood car. Also, it was surprising that practically all video games use similar basic steps to render each frame. Furthermore, as a fun fact, to create this video our team used 1x 3090ti, 3x 3090s, and the model that we tore down was a 3090. There are just sooooo many topics in the realm of computer graphics that we couldn't cover. If you're interested in part 2 where we'll cover things like UVs, Normal Maps, Shadows, Reflections, Specular Reflections, and much more, tell us in the comments. Do you want to support in-depth engineering and technology education? Support us at: patreon.com/brancheducation Website: branch.education On Facebook: facebook.com/BranchEducation/ Table of Contents: 00:00 - Video Game Graphics 01:11 - Graphics Rendering Pipeline and Vertex Shading 04:16 - Video Game Consoles & Graphics Cards 05:06 - Rasterization 06:51 - Visibility Z Buffer Depth Buffer 10:03 - Pixel Fragment Shading 11:35 - The Math Behind Pixel Shading 14:05 - Vector Math & Brilliant Sponsorship 16:11 - Flat vs Smooth Shading 17:25 - An Appreciation for Video Games 17:58- Ray Tracing 18:45 - DLSS Deep Learning Super Sampling 19:06 - GPU Architecture and Types of Cores 20:06 - Future Videos on Advanced Topics 20:24 - Outro for Video Game Graphics Key Branches from this video are: How do JPEGs Work? How does Computer Hardware Work? Erratum: Animation: Mike Radjabov, Prakash Kakadiya, Teddy Tablante Script: Teddy Tablante Twitter: @teddytablante Modeling: Mike Radjabov, Prakash Kakadiya Voice Over: Phil Lee Sound Design: www.drilu.mx Sound Effects and Music Editor: Raúl Núñez Supervising Sound Editor and Mixer: Luis Huesca Animation built using Blender 4.0.1 blender.org/ References: The most important resource for making this video was Cem Yuksel [ youtube.com/@cem_yuksel ] a professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. His online course on computer graphics and interactive graphics was incredibly useful. "NVIDIA Ampere GA102 GPU Architecture" Second-Generation RTX. NVIDIA Corporation 2021 Wikipedia contributors. "Computer Animation" "Computer Graphics". "CUDA". "Graphics Pipeline". "Histor