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An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

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Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#31

Post by jsheard »

gigatexal wrote: post #30

Is anyone else astonished at how much is missing in the hardware and how much is emulated?

The things being emulated are mostly legacy features that are barely used in modern software, if at all, so the overhead of emulating them for backward compatibility isn't the end of the world. I can't blame Apple for not supporting geometry shaders in hardware, when they're widely considered to be a mistake that never should have been standardized in the first place, and Metal never supported them at all so they could only ever come up in old OpenGL code on macOS.

https://x.com/pointinpolygon/status/1270695113967181827

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#32

Post by dylan604 »

amelius wrote: post #29
dylan604 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what they do is just this side of magic, so maybe it's not really a costume?

Any sufficiently closed technology is indistinguishable from magic. In fact, the company is so closed that Rosenzweig is the one we should consult when we encounter aliens.

I don't think the work they do is what one could call closed though is it?

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#33

Post by parl_match »

jsheard wrote: post #31
gigatexal wrote: post #30

Is anyone else astonished at how much is missing in the hardware and how much is emulated?

The things being emulated are mostly legacy features that are barely used in modern software, if at all, so the overhead of emulating them for backward compatibility isn't the end of the world. I can't blame Apple for not supporting geometry shaders in hardware, when they're widely considered to be a mistake that never should have been standardized in the first place, and Metal never supported them at all so they cou…

I wouldn't go so far as to say "mistake that should never have been standardized". Their intended use was always pretty limited, though. There's zero reason for anything built in recent memory to use them.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#34

Post by wtallis »

coldtea wrote: post #25
wmf wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably. Apple made major changes to the GPU in M3.

Major base changes, or just added more stuff on top of the same base?

https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/apple-dynamic-caching-on-... Changing the register file into a cache sounds like a major base change. Raytracing is a major feature added on top of existing functionality. So I'd say the answer is: plenty of both.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#35

Post by talldayo »

colechristensen wrote: post #21
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Are you being offended for yourself or on behalf of other people? If the latter, please leave that for others to judge for themselves.

There's something rich about this gjsman showing up to defend Apple as an unpaid lackey, and inventing controversy to justify hating the opposition. I'd say something like "I wonder what it's like inside this user's head" but it seems like their deepest insecurities have been made quite external by now.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#36

Post by whatever1 »

dividuum wrote: post #24
scottlamb wrote: post #14

> tessellator.cl is the most unhinged file of my career ...so far. The presenter is only 23 apparently. Maybe I'm speaking only for myself here, but I think career unhingedness does not go down over time as much as one might hope. In all seriousness, she does really impressive work, so when she says this 2,000 lines of C++ is inscrutable, that gives one pause. Glad it's working nonetheless.

I guess it's these two files? The original 2600+ lines of C++: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/asahi/mesa/-/blob/main/src/ga... The translated code: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/asahi/mesa/-/blob/main/src/as...

She is not doing CI/CD so the PMs would fire her in any modern company. "Where are the unit tests?!? How is it possible to write code without tests and 100% coverage!"

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#37

Post by jsheard »

parl_match wrote: post #33
jsheard wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things being emulated are mostly legacy features that are barely used in modern software, if at all, so the overhead of emulating them for backward compatibility isn't the end of the world. I can't blame Apple for not supporting geometry shaders in hardware, when they're widely considered to be a mistake that never should have been standardized in the first place, and Metal never supported them at all so they cou…

I wouldn't go so far as to say "mistake that should never have been standardized". Their intended use was always pretty limited, though. There's zero reason for anything built in recent memory to use them.

They had limited uses and turned out to be incredibly hard to implement efficiently in hardware, so in practice it was nearly always faster to just keep using the proven techniques that GS was supposed to replace.

http://www.joshbarczak.com/blog/?p=667

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#39

Post by dtquad »

gigatexal wrote: post #30

Is anyone else astonished at how much is missing in the hardware and how much is emulated?

The graphics pipeline in modern GPUs are mostly a thin low-level Vulkan/Metal-like layer on top of a massively parallel CUDA-like compute architecture.

It's basically all emulated. One of the reasons GPU manufacturers are unwilling to open source their drivers is because a lot of their secret sauce actually happens in software in the drivers on top of the massively parallel CUDA-like compute architecture.

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