91–100 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.
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Purchasing one has been illegal since 1863, but the technology typically used is a human assistant, although the signal is usually more subtle.
Who can forget 1863. The year BigMagic ruined the fun for everyone.
> 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.
That's not even a costume because she's definitely a wizard
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Major base changes, or just added more stuff on top of the same base?
How it handles memory and registers is quite different.
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…
> 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.
It's unfathomable that she's 23 and wrote an open source graphics driver for a closed-source graphics card. At least Einstein had the decency to wait until he was 26 to invent special relativity.
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Is this really so different from any other mobile derived GPU?
Yes. Apple have their own graphics API. They were able to decide that, say, geometry shaders aren't worth the chip area or engineering effort to support. Other IHVs don't get that choice; for geometry shaders, for instance, they're part of both Vulkan and OpenGLES, there are games and benchmarks that use them, and customers (end-users, gamedevs, review/benchmark sites, SoC vendors) will evaluate GPUs based, in some s…
Do they? I can't remember ever seeing any mention of Geometry Shader performance in a GPU review I've read/watched. The one thing I've ever heard about it was about how bad they were.
I always wondered about these /SubscriberLink/ links. Is sharing them considered unethical?
It's not different from shared articles here from subscriber-only newsletters being accompanied by the archived link in the topmost comment. Users here seem to not care about those "ethics"
Its a pretty absurd expectation.
I always wondered about these /SubscriberLink/ links. Is sharing them considered unethical?
I'm sure that they are very, very happy that HN is directing a firehose of traffic at their site on the regular. In order to subscribe people need to know that LWN exists.