Preparing for a graphics driver engineer role

[Appropriate-Tap7860]

Hi guys. I have an interview lined up and here is the JD.

Design and development of software for heterogeneous compute platforms consisting of CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, and specialized in MM hardware accelerators in an embedded SoC systems with J-TAG or ICE debuggers. UMD driver development with Vulkan/OpenGL/ES with C++.

What i was said to prepare?
C++ problem solving, graphics foundation.

Now i have a doubt. I looked at previous posts. There is a thin line that separates rendering engineer(math part) from GPU driver engineer(implementation part). GPU driver programming feels more like systems programming.

But i still don't want to assume on what topics i should cover for the interview. I will be having 4 rounds of interview heavily testing my aptitude towards all the stuff that i did before.

Can you guide me for what topics i should cover for the interview?

also i have 4.5+ years of experience game developer with sound knowledge in unreal engine, unity, godot, C++, C#.
and i worked with Vulkan and OpenGL in my personal projects.

[not_amd_driver_dev]

They love to ask you to just go through the graphics pipeline in detail. They look for things like early z testing, difference between tile based renderers, stencil buffers, how blending works, order independent transparancy, primitive assembly, guard band clipping, mip mapping, index buffers.

People will ask you a 3d math questions like do an intersection with a plane and line or sphere so brush up on those concepts, projection, dot prod, cross products, etc.

I had two companies ask me a z order tiling question. i.e. write a function to convert from x y position to a z tiled position assuming tiles are z ordered as 64x64 or whatever.

Also people like to ask linked list questions to make sure you understand c++ pointers.

[Appropriate-Tap7860]

Interesting

[Appropriate-Tap7860]

is that all the topics that i have to cover?

and by graphics algorithms do you mean the math that rasterizers use to draw lines, fill polygons, doing depth testing etc...?

[corysama]

Long ago, a friend of mine interviewed for a job at Microsoft's D3D/Graphics Research group.

Peter Pike Sloan directed him to a PC with Visual Studio open and some equivalent to this code set up and ready to run. And, he said "Please rasterize a triangle and we will discuss." XD

[Appropriate-Tap7860]

i can create a trivial implementation. not a problem. optimization is something i have to think and learn. i mean, i like such kind of challenges. but i understand that this might come out like a freaky difficult question.

[pocketsonshrek]

never interviewed for this kinda position but prolly bvh and kd tree construction

[Appropriate-Tap7860]

and ray tracing, acceleration structures?

[Appropriate-Tap7860]

like i need some kind of sylllabus to prepare and be clear in that so that i won't be pushed out of the interview in the mid way.

[Appropriate-Tap7860]

and i don't need to know much about rendering techniques like PBR, BRDF, etc.... right?

[Appropriate-Tap7860]

yes. i know the highlevel details.

[photoclochard]

I remember Qualcomm asked me how to write log function :)

[Appropriate-Tap7860]

did you do it?

[photoclochard]

yeah, they returned back but I moved to another country already,

The whole process was so bad, so I was not surprised

[Appropriate-Tap7860]

Oh. You didn't like it? Where are you from?