Comment by _dps
7 years ago
I think the two "poles" you've identified are good ones (~microseconds matter and ~100ms matters) but there's a wide range in between. If you do anything with video at modern resolutions, then you're in the single-millisecond-matters regime (this includes games as mentioned upthread, and just about anything in VR as well).
Video streaming and gaming have some soft realtime guarantees, yeah, though generally these aren't systems programming and application programming instead.
The plumbing below, ie graphics rendering pipeline, tend to fall into the category of kernel systems programming, controlling the GPU is pretty close to doing what a kernel does IMO.