Hey,

I'm looking for a piece of advice, considering that my end-goal is to land a job in the game industry as a Rendering/Graphics Engineer.

I've been working for the past year in a company that relates to the game industry( we don't make games ) as a Graphics Programmer. My main focus is not on rendering effects or game programming, but mainly doing performance optimizations to games (without having access to their source code) mainly in relation to rendering optimizations. The shaders I sometimes write, for example, are used for events detection rather than actual graphics rendering. I don't write much graphics code, mostly analyze and solve problems from the knowledge of what a specific game does.

I learned a lot so far, but I feel like the job (like any other I assume) is getting more and more routine and I'm afraid it's not the only thing needed to land a job in the game industry since I'm missing the actual graphics programming side.

I've been recently offered a job at a different company that does medical 3D simulations. While this job will definitely be more on the graphics/realism side, it won't be related to games what so ever. Moreover, as most medical 3D simulations, the rendering is done using ray tracing (or volume rendering in general) - I'm not sure if they use rasterization for that or GPGPU techniques.

From your experience - should I stick with game-related but not rendering-related jobs, or make a switch to the medical 3D type of jobs in the next few months? What will help me more to land a job further along the road?

Another option would be to do a MSc in CS.

And as a side note, the gaming industry doesn't exist in my country so working in a game company at the moment isn't an options - only in the next few years.

Thanks a lot for your help!

Make the switch to the medical 3D simulation job. Even though you think what you'll be doing isn't "in the games field" the practices for graphics engineering apply to all fields. Recruiters/game companies will not turn you down if you do a kick ass job. When the right opportunity comes up, you can find another game related job to move to.

Secondly, you can also do your own graphics engineering projects in your spare time outside of your medical job. This will show a lot of initiative and passion to whomever in the industry is trying to hire you. It may be tough to manage that time (sure is for me and my side projects), but its worth it.

Thanks for the advice Nick!

Regarding your suggestion on doing some personal projects - would you recommend showcasing a full-scale 3D engine or a complete game, or creating several smaller demos each showcasing a specific graphics effect (perhaps implementing a whitepaper)?

I'd love to hear other people's opinions as well.

Thanks!

I've been recently offered a job at a different company that does medical 3D simulations. While this job will definitely be more on the graphics/realism side, it won't be related to games what so ever. Moreover, as most medical 3D simulations, the rendering is done using ray tracing (or volume rendering in general) - I'm not sure if they use rasterization for that or GPGPU techniques.

If job relates to 3D graphic or/and simulation take it as soon as compensation is up to your needs; do not expect to do a core development, it's most likely you will deal with already existing engine 99.98%. Meanwhile, if you have ambitions to develop your own engine to be later on in position to hire people to build API around it, then continue you private development and make sure it is explicitly excluded from your NDA with your current employer and be very careful to keep it clean (own computers/compilers etc...). The area to apply efforts should be out of pack; apparently, rasterization/GPGPU is the most crowded area and the least lucrative area to apply efforts unless you are fine to remain an employee for rest of your life. In computer graphics, one of area I would consider interesting is the adaptive ray tracing on MIMD; it could be a classical multi core CPUs hardware or may be Xeon-Phi SIMD/MIMD hybrid. Have fun...