My thought when reading this article was surprise at that perspective. It's not one I've seen before. A lot of comments here as well as in the article itself hi

My thought when reading this article was surprise at that perspective. It's not one I've seen before. A lot of comments here as well as in the article itself hints at the issue being that it's grown so much in the last decade that there's too much to get into for a beginner. I've worked with graphics programming since before these changes, so I might simply have had the benefit of watching it unfold while already having a decent grasp of the state of the art at the time. Is it more complex than any one person can handle? If we're talking grasp of the theory, I don't think so. I feel I have a rough idea of what tech is out there and how things work throughout most layers of hardware and software. And I'm not the most knowledgeable. But I dedicate quite a few hours every week to reading up or brushing up on things. If we're instead talking about a single person being responsible for the full graphics pipeline in a AAA game that certainly seems like too much. The projects I've been part of have ranged from teams of ten programmers using an in house engine to AAA productions based on fully featured engines maintained by a dedicated team. On both ends there were multiple programmers working on the graphics. I've also been the sole graphics programmer on a AA/large indie game using Unity. That's definitely possible and required me to understand and make modifications to most levels of the graphics pipeline.