In the first year of grad school when I was trying to choose a field to delve in, real time rendering was one of the options. So I took the relevant CS-fivesomething class to see how things worked.<p>The first time I got my feet wet with code, I realized that the workflow was mostly &quot;write and pray it works&quot;. No debugging tools, huge blobs of proprietary code and total lack of consensus among manufacturers even on the most basic stuff scared me away. I ended up doing a machine learning thesis instead.<p>This was almost ten years ago. I can&#x27;t say I&#x27;ve been following the graphics field closely, but my impression is that while tooling came a long way in the past ten years, the GPU is still mostly a black box for the developers who don&#x27;t have access to a debug build of the driver of the graphics hardware at hand.<p>Such initiatives couldn&#x27;t come soon enough.