Graphics and Rendering
From pixels to ray tracing — how images are represented, compressed, and rendered in real time and offline.
- Reading time
- ~18 min (+12 min optional)
- Level mix
- 5 beginner · 6 intermediate
Every image on a screen started as numbers. This path traces how those numbers get from a mathematical description to visible light: how images are stored and compressed, how a GPU rasterizes geometry into pixels, how shaders program that pipeline, and how video compression works.
The path is self-contained — it doesn’t assume a graphics programming background. It’s the right starting point whether you’re curious how JPEG works, why modern games use signed distance fields, or how video streaming keeps bitrates manageable.
Roadmap
Loading progress...
Images
The smallest addressable element of a digital image — a tiny coloured square that, together with billions of others, makes up what you see on a screen.
A specific way of describing colours numerically — defining which RGB triplets (or other coordinates) mean which colours in the real world.
The way pixels (and metadata) are encoded into a file — different formats trade size, quality, and feature support.
- JPEGOptional
The most common lossy image format — it shrinks photographs dramatically by discarding visual detail the human eye barely notices, trading some quality for much smaller files.
- PNGOptional
A lossless image format that preserves every pixel exactly and supports transparency — ideal for graphics, logos, screenshots, and text, where JPEG's lossy compression would smear detail.
Rendering
The technique of turning vector shapes (triangles, lines, text) into pixels — the dominant way real-time 3D graphics get drawn.
A small program that runs on the GPU to compute how geometry and pixels are drawn — controlling position, color, lighting, and effects — executed in parallel across millions of elements.
- Ray TracingOptional
A rendering technique that simulates light by tracing the paths of rays through a scene — producing physically accurate reflections, shadows, and lighting at a high computational cost.
Hardware
A processor designed for massive data-parallel work — originally for rendering graphics, now also the workhorse of machine learning, simulation, and crypto.
Video and media
A pair of algorithms — encoder and decoder — that compress and decompress media. The reason a 4K video isn't a terabyte.
- Video CodecOptional
An encoder/decoder that compresses video by exploiting redundancy within and between frames — the reason streaming and storing high-resolution video is feasible at all.