Don’t be too down on yourself. There’s actually more overlap between graphics programming and other disciplines than you might image. Imagine the gpu is your “server” and each cpu core is your “client.” We have a difficult job of feeding tons of data to keep the server occupied. We have to worry about memory hazards, as well as cpu-cpu synchronization and cpu-gpu synchronization. Like server engineers, we think about pipelining, data consistency, caching, compression, and more. The assets themselves need to be streamed from disk/network to memory, so that’s another systems programming concern.

This all happens independently of the actual kernels/shaders we dispatch on the GPU itself (where the 3d math and all that comes into play). There are definitely rendering programmers that specialize more in the stuff above though.