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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

#131

Post by raggi »

worstspotgain wrote: post #73
dividuum wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Is there a blog post about what specifically she found to be inscrutable? The C++ doesn't look all that terse at a syntactic level, and has plenty of comments. Are the problems at the domain level?

the original had more microsoft smells https://microsoft.github.io/DirectX-Specs/d3d/archive/images...

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#132

Post by IntelMiner »

adastra22 wrote: post #125
porphyra wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm I watched the video [1] and in the games where it had an unambiguous improvement, the improvement in reflection quality is extremely stark and noticeable. Anecdotally, when I was playing Black Myth Wukong recently, there were some shiny environments where full path tracing really made a huge difference. So I guess it's just a "gimmick" in that relatively few games properly take advantage of this currently, rather…

Using raytracing on a very recent, high end game that has been designed for raytracing has an extremely noticeable positive improvement on visual quality. Wukong is a perfect example. Unfortunately most people’s experience with raytracing is turning it on for a game that was not designed for it, but it was added through a patch, which results in worse lighting. Why? Because the rasterized image includes baked-in glob…

The first game I encountered with RayTracing support was World of Warcraft "Classic"'s Burning Crusade launch a couple years back.

WoW Burning Crusade launched in *2006* originally. The "Classic" re-release of the game uses the modern engine but with the original game art assets and content.

Does it do anything in the 'modern' WoW game? Probably! In Classic though all it did was tank my framerate.

Since then I also played the unimaginable disaster that was Cyberpunk 2077. For as "pretty" as I suppose the game looked I can't exactly say if the ray tracing improved anything

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#133

Post by flohofwoe »

adastra22 wrote: post #64

> 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.

...and yet the most popular use case for raytracing seems to be more correct reflections in puddles ;)

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#134

Post by pimeys »

jlarocco wrote: post #100
zarzavat wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know this is off on a tangent, but I recently signed up for LWN and it's well worth the price. The articles and news items alone are worth it, but the archive is just amazing.

Same here. I originally found LWN through a HN post. I've been a subscriber for a few years now, and I'm reading almost everything they publish, even if I'm not always understanding everything they talk about. The quality of writing is very high.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#135

Post by flohofwoe »

musictubes wrote: post #91
adastra22 wrote: post #64

> 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.

Can the hardware for ray tracing be used for anything else? Ray tracing is just math, is that math applicable for any non graphics use?

It should be useful for anything that involves stabbing checks on large triangle soups. Whether it's worth "wasting" die space for this is debatable of course.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#136

Post by flohofwoe »

adastra22 wrote: post #113
talldayo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3D TVs failed before they existed as a product category. You cannot encode enough information through stereoscopy to create a convincing or "realistic" 3D effect. The conditions for making it work have always been fickle and as 6DOF VR/AR is proving, it was never enough to be convincing anyways. Encoding two slightly different versions of a video and layering them on top of each other is a dirty hack. It is not a hol…

Thank you. This guy gets it. Path tracing is the gold standard for computer graphics. It is a physically based rendering model that is based on how lighting actually works. There are degrees of path tracing of varying quality, but there is nothing else that is better from a visual quality and accuracy standpoint. Your modern AAA title does a massive amount of impressive hacks to get rasterization into the uncanny val…

Think of the 'impressive hacks' used in realtime 3D rendering as compression techniques to reduce bandwidth (and this goes all the way back to 8-bit home computers with their tricky video memory encoding, this was essentially hardware image compression to reduce memory bandwidth).

Why waste computing power on 'physically correct' algorithms, when the 'cheap hacks' can do so much more in less time, while producing nearly the same result.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#137

Post by m4rtink »

hi_hi wrote: post #50
renewiltord wrote: post #2

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!

Maybe some ESP32 or other MCU and accelerometer ? That should comfortably fit into a magic wand.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#139

Post by jeroenhd »

hi_hi wrote: post #50
renewiltord wrote: post #2

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!

In this case there's probably a human doing the slides, but smart watches have apps that can control slideshows in a variety of ways. There's at least one WearOS app (WowMouse) that does some gesture based presentation control.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#140

Post by lewispollard »

rstat1 wrote: post #98
ferbivore wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>>(end-users, gamedevs, review/benchmark sites, SoC vendors) will evaluate GPUs based, in some small part, on how good their geometry shader support is 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.

Yeah, geometry shaders aren't even widely used, they weren't great in the first place and devs have moved on.
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