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Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

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Re: Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

#61

Post by p_l »

TillE wrote: post #55
breather wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, except for only working on xbox and windows, which pretty much destroys it as a viable direct target for modern games or apps. > Honestly, it would've been better to leave OpenGL to the legacy CAD vendors and standardize on Direct3D roundabout 1997 or so. If you remember what Microsoft was like in those days, the chances of D3D being standardized in a viable way on any platform but windows were about the same c…

> a viable direct target for modern games Aside from PlayStation exclusives, nearly every AAA game in the past 20+ years has targeted Direct3D and HLSL first. Any other backend is a port.

The XBox versions of DirectX aren't exactly compatible (in some pretty significant ways, IIRC)

Re: Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

#62

Post by saagarjha »

jokoon wrote: post #56

One day, Apple will deprecate opengl 3.3 core, and I guess everybody might end up deprecating it. I've read that generally opengl is just easier to use than vulkan, I don't know if that's true, but if something is too complicated, it becomes just too hard for less experienced devs to exploit those GPU, and it becomes a barrier to entry, which might discourage some indie game developers. Although everyone uses unity a…

My understanding is that one of the primary reasons Vulkan was developed was because OpenGL was not a good model for GPUs, and supporting it prevented people from taking advantage of the hardware in many cases.

Re: Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

#64

Post by wtallis »

saagarjha wrote: post #63

I find it very amusing that transitioning out of bounds accesses from traps to returning some random data is called “robustness”. Graphics programming certainly is weird.

It makes sense from the perspective of writing graphics drivers, and aligns with Postel's law (also called the robustness principle). GPU drivers are all about making broken applications run, or run faster. Making your GPU drivers strict by default won't fix the systemic problems with the video game industry shipping broken code, it'll just drive away all of your users.

And on hardware where branches are generally painfully expensive, it sounds really useful to have a flag to tell the system to quietly handle edge cases in whatever way is most efficient. I suspect there are a lot of valid use cases for such a mode where the programmer can be reasonably sure that those edge cases will have little or no impact on what the user ends up seeing in the final rendered frame.

Re: Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

#65

Post by _gabe_ »

taminka wrote: post #58
jokoon wrote: post #56

One day, Apple will deprecate opengl 3.3 core, and I guess everybody might end up deprecating it. I've read that generally opengl is just easier to use than vulkan, I don't know if that's true, but if something is too complicated, it becomes just too hard for less experienced devs to exploit those GPU, and it becomes a barrier to entry, which might discourage some indie game developers. Although everyone uses unity a…

> I've read that generally opengl is just easier to use than vulkan [here's]( https://learnopengl.com/code_viewer_gh.php?code=src/1.gettin... ) an opengl triangle rendering example code (~200 LOC) [here's]( https://vulkan-tutorial.com/code/17_swap_chain_recreation.cp... ) a vulkan triangle rendering example code (~1000 LOC) ye it's fair to say opengl is a bit easier to use ijbol

You’re getting downvoted for some reason, but OpenGL is absolutely easier. It abstracts so much (and for beginners there’s still a ton even with all the abstraction!). No need to think about how to prep pipelines, optimally upload your data, manually synchronize your rendering, and more with OpenGL, unlike Vulkan. The low level nature of Vulkan allows you to eek out every bit of performance, but for indie game developers and the majority of graphics development that doesn’t depend on realtime PBR with giant amounts of data, OpenGL is still immensely useful.

If anything, an OpenGL-like API will naturally be developed on top of Vulkan for the users that don’t care about all that stuff. And once again, I can’t stress this enough, OpenGL is still a lot for beginners. Shaders, geometric transformations, the fixed function pipeline, vertex layouts, shader buffer objects, textures, mip maps, instancing, buffers in general, there’s sooo much to learn and these foundations transcend OpenGL and apply to all graphics rendering. As a beginner, OpenGL allowing me to focus on the higher level details was immensely beneficial for me getting started on my graphics programming journey.

Re: Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

#66

Post by xign »

jokoon wrote: post #56

One day, Apple will deprecate opengl 3.3 core, and I guess everybody might end up deprecating it. I've read that generally opengl is just easier to use than vulkan, I don't know if that's true, but if something is too complicated, it becomes just too hard for less experienced devs to exploit those GPU, and it becomes a barrier to entry, which might discourage some indie game developers. Although everyone uses unity a…

FWIW Metal is actually easier to use than Vulkan in my opinion, as Vulkan is kind of designed to be super flexible and doesn't have as much niceties in it. Either way, OpenGL was simply too high level to be exposed as the direct API of the drivers. It's much better to have a lower level API like Vulkan as the base layer, and then build something like OpenGL on top of Vulkan instead. It maps much better to how GPU hardware works this way. There's a reason why we have a concept of software layers.

It's also not quite true that everyone uses Unity and Unreal. Just look at the Game of the Year nominees from The Game Award 2023. All 6 of them were built using in-house game engines. Among indies there are also still some amount of developers who develop their own engines (e.g. Hades), but it's true that the majority of them will just use an off-the-shelf one.

Re: Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

#67

Post by monocasa »

saagarjha wrote: post #63

I find it very amusing that transitioning out of bounds accesses from traps to returning some random data is called “robustness”. Graphics programming certainly is weird.

The out of bounds accesses don't necessarily trap without the robustness checks, so the robustness is about delivering known results under those goofy cases. So it makes sense when you combine that with the fact that GPUs are pretty against traps in general. Carmack remarked once that it's was a pain to get manufacturers to be into the idea of virtual memory when he was designing megatexture.

Re: Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

#68

Post by yazzku »

randgoog wrote: post #6
ics wrote: post #2

Another upvote, another article I wish I had the knowledge and patience to understand better in context. Still, Alyssa's writeups are a fun read.

Same, I wish I knew more about graphics programming. It seems like such a steep learning curve though so I get discouraged.

Don't be discouraged, modern graphics APIs really are a mess, but you don't need to understand 1/100th of them to get graphics going. Also, this post is more about programming drivers than programming graphics.

Re: Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

#69

Post by scheeseman486 »

_gabe_ wrote: post #65
taminka wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've read that generally opengl is just easier to use than vulkan [here's]( https://learnopengl.com/code_viewer_gh.php?code=src/1.gettin... ) an opengl triangle rendering example code (~200 LOC) [here's]( https://vulkan-tutorial.com/code/17_swap_chain_recreation.cp... ) a vulkan triangle rendering example code (~1000 LOC) ye it's fair to say opengl is a bit easier to use ijbol

You’re getting downvoted for some reason, but OpenGL is absolutely easier. It abstracts so much (and for beginners there’s still a ton even with all the abstraction!). No need to think about how to prep pipelines, optimally upload your data, manually synchronize your rendering, and more with OpenGL, unlike Vulkan. The low level nature of Vulkan allows you to eek out every bit of performance, but for indie game develo…

It won't be OpenGL-like, it will probably just be OpenGL https://docs.mesa3d.org/drivers/zink.html

Re: Conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1

#70

Post by rowanG077 »

eek2121 wrote: post #50
sho_hn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love for my employer to support that config at work. We have quite lovely Linux dev laptops, but the battery life of the M1/M2 machines in the IT shop is definitely enticing, and Asahi Linux gets closer to MacOS in that regard than you might think given the relative maturity and optimization.

It definitely isn’t ready for use as a daily driver. There are lots of bits missing (see below for an example) and power management isn’t great compared to macOS.

How so? I'm daily driving it as my only machine since November.sure there are missing features but none that are really essential for most people.
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