Top all-time · #4538
The Danger Zone
Personal blog · therealmjp.github.ioprogramminggames
The Danger Zone is a personal blog at therealmjp.github.io about programming and games. Since 2019, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 25 times, most often “An Introduction to Real-Time Subsurface Scattering”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-09-07, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link The Danger Zone for in-depth real-time graphics posts on shader permutations and pipeline compilation stutter, deferred texturing, subsurface scattering, and older XNA/PIX tooling.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Graphics, engine, and game programming. And maybe a few other things
Most-linked posts?
- An Introduction to Real-Time Subsurface Scattering3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-10-07
- To Early-Z, or Not To Early-Z3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-04-14
- The Shader Permutation Problem – Part 1: How Did We Get Here?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-08-01
- Ten Years of D3D122 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-09-08
What Hacker News says?
The PSO problem is referring to this, right? https://therealmjp.github.io/posts/shader-permutations-part1...
Comment linking /posts/shader-permutations-part1/
on “No Graphics API”Submitted An Introduction to Real-Time Subsurface Scattering as a story · 147 points
HN discussionHuman skin is translucent too. Real time Sub-surface scattering has existed for years and is now to making it into games. There's an excellent writeup here: https://therealmjp.github.io/posts/sss-intro/ Realtime reflections seem to be on their way too: https://youtu.be/pNmhJx8yPLk
Comment linking /posts/sss-intro/
on “Why Is 1 World Trade Center Missing from Spider-Man?”Submitted Ten Years of D3D12 as a story · 74 points
HN discussionAh yeah pipeline compilation is a very non-trivial problem[1]. Unreal is also struggling with this a lot. I hear you that it's an issue. The Bevy issue you want to follow is https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/10871 . [1]: https://therealmjp.github.io/posts/shader-permutations-part1 + https://therealmjp.github.io/posts/shader-permutations-part2
Comment linking /posts/shader-permutations-part2
on “Bevy 0.15 released”Submitted Shader Printf in HLSL and DX12 as a story · 48 points
HN discussionConsole vs PC is a red herring since UE games still stutter on consoles, people just notice that less because most games run at 30 fps anyway. You can read Unreal's own blog posts on this and they'll actually explain that this is mostly down to their material system (and game logic/scripts reaching into it) being designed to create nearly infinite shader variations on the fly in response to arbitrary world/game stat…
Comment linking /posts/shader-permutations-part1/
on “Microsoft Fire IdTech Team at Id Software”Submitted Ten Years of D3D12 as a story · 5 points
HN discussionBecause GPU developers started to be less lazy :) No T&L meant everything was culled, clipped, transformed and per-vertex divided (perspective, lighting) on CPU. Then you have brute force approach. Voodoo 1/2/3 doesnt employ any obvious speedup tricks in its pipeline. Every single triangle pushed into it is going to get textured (bilinear filtering, per pixel divide), shaded (lighting, blending, FOG applied) and the…
Comment linking /posts/to-earlyz-or-not-to-earlyz/
on “The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?”Submitted To Early-Z, or Not To Early-Z as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe classic post on Deferred Texturing is MJP's, if you want to learn more about the technique: https://therealmjp.github.io/posts/bindless-texturing-for-de... Also see the recent post here which covers more benchmarks and details: http://filmicworlds.com/blog/visibility-buffer-rendering-wit...
Comment linking /posts/bindless-texturing-for-deferred-rendering-and-decals/
on “Adventures with Deferred Texturing in Horizon Forbidden West”Submitted Ten Years of D3D12 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIf you're interested in more background about one user-visible problem being directly attacked by this new GPU architecture, that could be "shader compilation stutter" (although there are many others). These are two excellent posts that go deep on this: The Shader Permutation Problem - Part 1: How Did We Get Here? The Shader Permutation Problem - Part 2: How Do We Fix It? In particular, the second post has the line:…
Comment linking /posts/shader-permutations-part2/
on “GPU advancements in M3 and A17 Pro [video]”Submitted Ten Years of D3D12 as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOh The Danger Zone had essential XNA knowledge ~2010 https://therealmjp.github.io/posts/pix-with-xna/
Comment linking /posts/pix-with-xna/
on “The Shader Permutation Problem – Part 1: How Did We Get Here?”Submitted Adventures in Retro Development: SNES Edition as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted An Introduction to Real-Time Subsurface Scattering as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted To Early-Z, or Not To Early-Z as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Shader Permutation Problem – Part 1: How Did We Get Here? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted GPU Memory Pools in D3D12 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Half the Precision, Twice the Fun: Working with FP16 in HLSL as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted What Is a Barrier? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Hello, Hugo as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
