I learned this stuff a long while ago, but I found a promising textbook for you to review [0] tldr; the "easy 80%" of the effort in GPU rendering, specifically

I learned this stuff a long while ago, but I found a promising textbook for you to review [0] tldr; the "easy 80%" of the effort in GPU rendering, specifically, is reformatting graphics data in forms that the GPU prefers. (The "hard 20%" is dealing with confusing APIs, broken implementations, etc.) Graphics techniques themselves may apply various mathematics(geometry, trigonometry, a little bit of linear algebra, DSP), either on the CPU or GPU. To render things you make decisions about the processing and output format and write data and algorithms accordingly. [0] http://math.hws.edu/graphicsbook/ http://math.hws.edu/graphicsbook/