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Old Proposal: Computer Graphics
New Proposal: Computer Graphics

While Stack Overflow is a great site, it is meant for specific programming questions. From the official help page:

What topics can I ask about here?

  • specific programming problems
  • software algorithms
  • software tools commonly used by programmers
  • practical, answerable problems that are unique to software development

Certain questions (that would be accepted here) would be considered out-of-scope/off-topic on Stack Overflow. Examples:

  • What advantages does scanline rendering have over raytracer rendering?
  • Are there any advantages for graphics cards that use shared memory?
  • What exactly is a "GPU Boost"?

One of the main benefits this site would give to the Stack Exchange Network is that you could ask hardware specific (gpu) questions, while bridged to graphics programming topics and all under one site. If this site didn't exist, you could ask graphics library questions on gamedev; image processing on math or mathematica; computational geometry on stack overflow, gamedev, or blender; ray tracing on stackoverflow; and gpgpu on stackoverflow (although there isn't a great user-base for this on there). So, for experts in this field, they would have to participate in 3-5 sites and there would be no place for gpu specific questions or benchmarking.

To summarize, the addition of this site would create a place for graphics programmers to answer/ask questions related to their field and would create a place for asking questions related to graphics cards.

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    I agree. There is a decided lack of areas to share information about specific GPUs and architectures, and this area would be very valuable to software developers in the embedded systems fields who wish to integrate with graphics hardware on a low level, as well as game and software devs who need to know fringe details of their graphics hardware. That said, perhaps "Computer Graphics Programming" is a misleading name for this proposal?
    – Shotgun Ninja
    Nov 27, 2013 at 20:51
  • @ShotgunNinja Good point. Any suggestions?
    – Daniel
    Nov 28, 2013 at 4:24
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    Graphics Layer Architecture (or Architects) - Stack Exchange or GLASE for short.
    – Tom 'Blue' Piddock
    Nov 28, 2013 at 11:08
  • Ah, glad you liked it.
    – Tom 'Blue' Piddock
    Nov 29, 2013 at 23:31
  • @Blue good idea, but some people want it back how it was. Post your input here.
    – Daniel
    Dec 12, 2013 at 1:07
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    "If this site didn't exist, you could ask graphics library questions on gamedev; image processing on math or mathematica" I would add that you could also ask image processing questions on photo.SE, even questions about optics could be asked on physics.SE. It would be nice indeed to have a place to gather Computer Graphics related questions.
    – wip
    Dec 12, 2013 at 2:00
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    I think the very strength of this site (that it brings together people with several different areas of expertise, for when you don't just want an optics expert or a GPU card expert) is best protected by keeping a broad name like Computer Graphics Programming. There will be much overlap between closely related topics in the questions, so attracting and keeping overlapping expertise is essential.
    – trichoplax is on Codidact now
    Mar 13, 2014 at 21:14
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    @githubphagocyte I couldn't agree more.
    – Daniel
    Mar 14, 2014 at 18:50
  • Just to mention some possible negative impacts: a question on computergraphicsprogramming.SE could maybe get less attention than the same question on stackoverflow.SE - so some people might rather want to post their questions still on stackoverflow instead on this planned SE. There is nothing that is really unique except the combination of all these things - without enough traffic people might still ask all these question on the other SEs mathematics/gamedev/stackoverflow/..
    – NoDataDumpNoContribution
    Jul 9, 2014 at 15:58
  • Weird; I wonder why Computer Science does not appear in your list of related sites?
    – Raphael
    Sep 19, 2015 at 17:02

2 Answers 2

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As the StackExchange network is expanding beyond comprehension, a more appropriate solution would be the ability to cross-post on several sites. The same question with all the answers would show up on several sites, but the earned reputation should be split among the sites where the user has registered.

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    The idea sounds good. Many SEs are partly overlapping and many users post in sever SEs. In the far future the difference between different SEs should become less visible. Cross-posting itself may not be the best thing though.
    – NoDataDumpNoContribution
    Jul 9, 2014 at 15:55
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A generalized computer graphics stackexchange also has a much better potential for attracting experts from fields of computer graphics which are not attracted to the other sites at all. For example, scientific visualization is such a field. I also suspect you do not find many VFX people with their fancy ray tracers active on stackoverflow or gamedev.stackexchange either. I suspect you probably don't find a lot of experts in the field of physically based rendering (this goes from professionals in various fields, to researchers and their students at universities) active on SO, gamedev.stackexchange, or physics.stackexchange, either.

I think this stackexchange has a vastly better potential to attract those people, and I think they're absolutely vital to a great learning resource for computer graphics. I can totally imagine some video game graphics dev asking a question for a novel problem in his field on the site, and a scientific visualization guy comes along and says "oh yeah we've solved this a decade ago, here are the relevant papers that describe the solution".

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  • The current questions posted don't attract VFX artist, I dont see 3ds max or houdini in the top example questions
    – Rosenthal
    Sep 8, 2014 at 3:46

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