An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

Post by david-gpu » Sat, Nov 02, 2024, 1:56 AM UTC

user_7832 wrote: post #161

david-gpu wrote: post #141

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As a former insider, this is NOT remotely how I would describe reality. I have signed NDAs and don't feel comfortable going into any detail, other than saying that there is a TON going on inside GPUs that is not "basically all emulated".

Maybe a tall ask, but have you considered writing down all your experiences into a book, and release it after all NDAs expire? I’d love to read more about low level hardware and the behind the scenes stuff involved. I’m sure you’ve got a lot of good stories.

Post by olliej » Sat, Nov 02, 2024, 2:05 AM UTC

ferbivore wrote: post #82

olliej wrote: post #75

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> for reasons that go way over my head 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…

Mesh shaders are actually useful. Or at least game engine people love them, which was not the case for geometry shaders or even tessellation really. They are extremely painful to add support for though. Aside from Apple I don't think any mobile IHVs have a working implementation.

Post by adastra22 » Sat, Nov 02, 2024, 5:20 AM UTC

kllrnohj wrote: post #183

boulos wrote: post #102

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You'll have to see what the instruction set / features are capable of, but most likely the "hardware ray tracing" support means it can do ray-BVH and ray-triangle intersection in hardware. You can reuse ray-box and ray-triangle intersection for collision detection. The other parts of ray tracing like shading and so on, are usually just done on the general compute.

> You can reuse ray-box and ray-triangle intersection for collision detection. The problem with doing so, though, and with GPU physics in general is that it's too high latency to incorporate effectively into a typical game loop. It'll work fine for things that don't impact the world, like particle simulations or hair/cloth physics, but for anything interactive the latency cost tends to kill it. That and also the GPU…

Post by Nullabillity » Sat, Nov 02, 2024, 7:30 AM UTC

Mawr wrote: post #274

Nullabillity wrote: post #265

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The question isn't " can you achieve your look with RT?" but "do you need RT to achieve your look?". As long as traditional lighting is enough (and given that it has for the last 2 decades or so), RT remains a gimmick.

Let me get this 100% straight, rendering light the exact same way reality itself does it is a gimmick? In any case, RT isn't just about getting pretty graphics. It massively lowers the artists' workload since there's no need to painstakingly go through each in-game area and add fake lights to make everything look good. No gaming studio will pass up on the opportunity to get better graphics and better productivity. It…

Post by kllrnohj » Sat, Nov 02, 2024, 10:06 AM UTC

adastra22 wrote: post #275

kllrnohj wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can reuse ray-box and ray-triangle intersection for collision detection. The problem with doing so, though, and with GPU physics in general is that it's too high latency to incorporate effectively into a typical game loop. It'll work fine for things that don't impact the world, like particle simulations or hair/cloth physics, but for anything interactive the latency cost tends to kill it. That and also the GPU…

I don't follow. You would do intersection tests every frame, right? Run the intersection tests, feed the results into the next frame calculation. Results may be delayed 1 frame, but at 60Hz or 120Hz that isn't really a problem.