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The first conformant M1 GPU driver

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Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#71

Post by CharlesW »

bsaul wrote: post #12

"Of course, Asahi Lina and I are two individuals with minimal funding. It’s a little awkward that we beat the big corporation…" Love the euphemism. This puts Apple to shame, plain and simple. They obviously don't care about standards, or compliance, because they like people to be walled in their own little private garden (still waiting for the facetime standard, or any kind of cross-platform technology created in the…

> They obviously don't care about standards…

Apple has invented, contributed to, and adopted a long list of standards. You can easily Google or ChatGPT the list if you don't know your tech history.

Apple deprecated OpenGL and OpenCL support in 2018 for very reasonable technological and strategic reasons that I understand you disagree with. But that doesn't change the fact that OpenGL is a terrible fit for modern computing/GPU architectures.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#72

Post by Waterluvian »

> Of course, Asahi Lina and I are two individuals with minimal funding. It’s a little awkward that we beat the big corporation…

Is the big corporation even racing you? Does it care? What devs and superusers want is regularly at odds with what makes sense for the actual business cases of a product.

I want all these things, too! But I recognize that it doesn't happen because what I want fails to make a solid business case, not because Apple is somehow incapable of writing an OpenGL driver for their own hardware.

If I'm in charge of the resourcing that could be committed to broader graphics standards support for M1/M2, what is the concrete (not hypothetical) case one can present to sell me that this is the right thing to focus on? I won't pretend to have the answer to this. There may very well be a very strong case to make. But it just doesn't quite feel right how I notice, on a daily basis, this lack of exploration or even just appreciation of all the factors and constraints that exist outside the technical portion of the problem. Maybe I'm just sensitive to this kind of issue because I feel this pain often at work.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#73

Post by Jasper_ »

bsaul wrote: post #12

"Of course, Asahi Lina and I are two individuals with minimal funding. It’s a little awkward that we beat the big corporation…" Love the euphemism. This puts Apple to shame, plain and simple. They obviously don't care about standards, or compliance, because they like people to be walled in their own little private garden (still waiting for the facetime standard, or any kind of cross-platform technology created in the…

It's because OpenGL is a dying specification based on an outdated, horrible programming model, and Khronos's conformance tests are weird and ridiculous. The conformance tests are not open-source (there's a separate "conformance suite" available on GitHub which is based on Google's dEQP, not the Khronos internal test suite), and there can be some pretty major bugs and gaps in your implementation while still getting it "certified standards-compatible".

Apple has committed to support for OpenGL 3.1, and that's it. They even rewrote their OpenGL driver for Apple M1 to be an emulation layer on top of Metal, so that existing applications keep working, but they're not going to implement any newer versions of OpenGL. Nor should they.

I have a lot of criticisms of Apple, and I think they could be doing a lot to make Metal a better API with better tooling, but not caring about OpenGL is a perfectly sane decision here.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#75

Post by matthew-wegner »

freedomben wrote: post #57
matthew-wegner wrote: post #5

Why is M2 Ultra support missing? I'm curious more than anything--lack of developer hardware? Something technical? "The Khronos website lists all conformant implementations, including our drivers for the M1, M1 Pro/Max/Ultra, M2, and M2 Pro/Max." Edit: Interesting that so many people are downvoting this. I'm not complaining; I didn't know, so I asked a question. Seems like the answer is that it's too new, especially w…

You're being downvoted because people assume you're making an implicit criticism with your question, and many people tend to assume the worst intent rather than the best intent like they're supposed to. Fortunately it usually balances out after some time. Adding a clarification like you did is the correct thing to do (and always a good idea, especially in a text forum).

Right, but that clarification was pre-edit?

I'm aware of people's sensitivity to putting demands on efforts like this, which is why I tried to frame it as the genuine curiosity it is.

This sort of low-level work is out of my depth. Is there painstaking probing to find different addresses/states between a Max and an Ultra? The M2 Ultra has two GPU variants (60-core and 72-core), although the Pro and Max also have GPU count variants. Are those transparent from this OpenGL driver's point of view? Or is there timing/dispatch work involved? Hence the question!

I would have made an explicit criticism if I had one. I implied nothing, but I realize that has no bearing on what the reader can or will infer...

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#77

Post by behnamoh »

jolux wrote: post #17
bsaul wrote: post #12

"Of course, Asahi Lina and I are two individuals with minimal funding. It’s a little awkward that we beat the big corporation…" Love the euphemism. This puts Apple to shame, plain and simple. They obviously don't care about standards, or compliance, because they like people to be walled in their own little private garden (still waiting for the facetime standard, or any kind of cross-platform technology created in the…

Apple ended up in a battle with a patent troll over FaceTime, which could be part of why it hasn’t been opened up.

I'm just glad we now have much better alternatives to FaceTime that Apple will soon have no choice but to open up.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#78

Post by jamincan »

paulddraper wrote: post #59
europeanNyan wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you completely and yet it's practically impossible finding a worthwhile alternative. I've tried finding alternatives on my last upgrade cycle and it's like having to live with endless amounts of compromises just to get away from Apple. For the iPhone, I tried looking at the Pixel for the Vanilla Android experience and long support, yet it seems like people are fighting battery life issues all the time. N…

> yet it seems like people are fighting battery life issues all the time I miss the days when I charged my cell phone twice a week. It didn't take 100 mexapixel photos or display 4K cat GIFs, so I understand why. But I miss that battery life nonetheless.

I have found that my newest phone (Samsung S23) has significantly better battery life than my old Pixel 3a ever did. I really have to try hard to run the battery down and with my normal usage it easily lasts two days.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#79

Post by doctorpangloss »

bsaul wrote: post #12

"Of course, Asahi Lina and I are two individuals with minimal funding. It’s a little awkward that we beat the big corporation…" Love the euphemism. This puts Apple to shame, plain and simple. They obviously don't care about standards, or compliance, because they like people to be walled in their own little private garden (still waiting for the facetime standard, or any kind of cross-platform technology created in the…

These two are tremendously cool.

The story seems really complicated from a technical point of view.

Whom is OpenGL ES 3.1 compliance for?

Apple is shipping DirectX compatibility in Game Porting Toolkit.

I understand you are making a stylized comment. My stylized comment is, there's a lot of stuff going on everywhere, all the time, with all sorts of technologies. You're not illuminating for me, compared to all the other people toiling in obscurity, what about this has pressed so many buttons for the Hacker News audience? Because it's not OpenGL ES 3.1 compliance.

Re: The first conformant M1 GPU driver

#80

Post by post-it »

europeanNyan wrote: post #36
bsaul wrote: post #12

"Of course, Asahi Lina and I are two individuals with minimal funding. It’s a little awkward that we beat the big corporation…" Love the euphemism. This puts Apple to shame, plain and simple. They obviously don't care about standards, or compliance, because they like people to be walled in their own little private garden (still waiting for the facetime standard, or any kind of cross-platform technology created in the…

I agree with you completely and yet it's practically impossible finding a worthwhile alternative. I've tried finding alternatives on my last upgrade cycle and it's like having to live with endless amounts of compromises just to get away from Apple. For the iPhone, I tried looking at the Pixel for the Vanilla Android experience and long support, yet it seems like people are fighting battery life issues all the time. N…

> Also, couldn't find anything coming near the value of a baseline Macbook Air M1 as far as build quality, battery life, stability etc. is concerned.

And the trackpad! I always evangelize the Macbook trackpad because that shit is bananas, as it were.

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