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-fivesome

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. The first time I got my feet wet with code, I realized that the workflow was mostly "write and pray it works". 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. This was almost ten years ago. I can't say I'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't have access to a debug build of the driver of the graphics hardware at hand. Such initiatives couldn't come soon enough.