71–80 of 291 posts
> frankly, I think ray tracing is a bit of a gimmick feature That's incredibly arrogant. The whole industry is adopting ray tracing, and it is a very desired feature people are upgrading video cards to get working on games they play.
Will M3/M4 need completely different drivers?
I think the answer is yes. I'm making assumptions based on this part of Alyssas talk a couple of weeks ago where she talks about M3 having specific driver support for raytracing which doesn't exist in previous versions. https://youtu.be/pDsksRBLXPk?t=2895 The whole thing is worth watching to be honest, it's a privilege to watch someone share their deep knowledge and talent in such an engaging and approachable way.
> 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...
The work by Alyssa R and Asahi Lina is great stuff. I have to say that a lot of this is really inscrutable unless you’re used to driver code. I wish it were much easier to write this stuff but hardware stuff is so idiosyncratic. Have to say I do enjoy all the old school style whimsy with the witch costume and whatnot.
I've just been watching her recent talk. I noticed she appears to change slides with a wave of her wand. Is there an known piece of hardware one can purchase to do this? I tried googling, but trying to find the specific result I'm interested in amongst all the blog spam garbage related to powerpoint is beyond me. Even googles own AI couldn't help. Sad times!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Major base changes, or just added more stuff on top of the same base?
M3 has mesh shader support. The geometry pipeline they inherited from PowerVR fundamentally doesn't support them, for reasons that go way over my head. They probably changed a good chunk of it.
In fairness to you I think a lot of the stuff involving hardware goes over everyone's heads :D
I've seen comments in a number of articles (and I think a few comments in this thread) saying that there are a few features in Vulcan/opengl/direct3d that were standardized ("standardized" in the D3D case?)/required that turned out to be really expensive to implement, hard to implement fast in hardware anyway, and not necessarily actually useful in practice. I think geometry shaders may have been one of those cases but I can't recall for sure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenGL and Vulkan have tons of tests and Alyssa runs them. I don't know if it's automated through CI.
Reportedly, the lack of M3 support so far is because there is no M3 Mac Mini which they can use for CI.
I always wondered about these /SubscriberLink/ links. Is sharing them considered unethical?
In order to subscribe people need to know that LWN exists.
I always wondered about these /SubscriberLink/ links. Is sharing them considered unethical?
Representatives of LWN have posted here before saying they are OK with it, along with a polite request not to have it go overboard since they need to fund the site and writers, editors, etc. That funding comes from subscriptions only IIUC. FWIW an LWN subscription is pretty affordable and supports some of the best in-depth technical reporting about Linux and linux-related topics available. (I am not affiliated with L…
"I would like to thank LWN's travel sponsor, the Linux Foundation, for travel assistance to Montreal for XDC."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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