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Rust running on every GPU

rust-gpu.github.io

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Re: Rust running on every GPU

#21

Post by omnicognate »

revskill wrote: post #7
omnicognate wrote: post #4

Zig can also compile to SPIR-V. Not sure about the others. (And I haven't tried the SPIR-V compilation yet, just came across it yesterday.)

I do not get u.

What don't you get?

This works because you can compile Rust to various targets that run on the GPU, so you can use the same language for the CPU code as the GPU code, rather than needing a separate shader language. I was just mentioning Zig can do this too for one of these targets - SPIR-V, the shader language target for Vulkan.

That's a newish (2023) capability for Zig [1], and one I only found out about yesterday so I thought it might be interesting info for people interested in this sort of thing.

For some reason it's getting downvoted by some people, though. Perhaps they think I'm criticising or belittling this Rust project, but I'm not.

[1] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/2683#issuecomment-1501...

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#22

Post by nromiun »

chrisldgk wrote: post #11

Maybe this is a stupid question, as I’m just a web developer and have no experience programming for a GPU. Doesn’t WebGPU solve this entire problem by having a single API that’s compatible with every GPU backend? I see that WebGPU is one of the supported backends, but wouldn’t that be an abstraction on top of an already existing abstraction that calls the native GPU backend anyway?

If it was that easy CUDA would not be the huge moat for Nvidia it is now.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#23

Post by MuffinFlavored »

kookamamie wrote: post #6
vouwfietsman wrote: post #3

Certainly impressive that this is possible! However, for my use cases (running on arbitrary client hardware) I generally distrust any abstractions over the GPU api, as the entire point is to leverage the low level details of the gpu. Treating those details as a nuisance leads to bugs and performance loss, because each target is meaningfully different. To overcome this, a similar system should be brought forward by th…

Exactly. Not sure why it would be better to run Rust on Nvidia GPUs compared to actual CUDA code. I get the idea of added abstraction, but do think it becomes a bit jack-of-all-tradesey.

> Exactly. Not sure why it would be better to run Rust on Nvidia GPUs compared to actual CUDA code.

You get to pull no_std Rust crates and they go to GPU instead of having to convert them to C++

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#24

Post by ducktective »

chrisldgk wrote: post #11

Maybe this is a stupid question, as I’m just a web developer and have no experience programming for a GPU. Doesn’t WebGPU solve this entire problem by having a single API that’s compatible with every GPU backend? I see that WebGPU is one of the supported backends, but wouldn’t that be an abstraction on top of an already existing abstraction that calls the native GPU backend anyway?

I think WebGPU is a like a minimum common API. Zed editor for Mac has targeted Metal directly.

Also, people have different opinions on what "common" should mean. OpenGL vs Vulkan. Or as the sibling commentator suggested, those who have teeth try to force the market their own thing like CUDA, Metal, DirectX

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#25

Post by LegNeato »

vouwfietsman wrote: post #3

Certainly impressive that this is possible! However, for my use cases (running on arbitrary client hardware) I generally distrust any abstractions over the GPU api, as the entire point is to leverage the low level details of the gpu. Treating those details as a nuisance leads to bugs and performance loss, because each target is meaningfully different. To overcome this, a similar system should be brought forward by th…

Rust is a system language, so you should have the control you need. We intend to bring GPU details and APIs into the language and core / std lib, and expose GPU and driver stuff to the `cfg()` system.

(Author here)

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#27

Post by LegNeato »

LowLevelMahn wrote: post #20
littlestymaar wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The performance purist don't use Cuda either though (that's why Deepseek used PTX directly). Everything is an abstraction and choosing the right level of abstraction for your usecase is a tradeoff between your engineering capacities and your performance needs.

this Rust demo also uses PTX directly During the build, build.rs uses rustc_codegen_nvvm to compile the GPU kernel to PTX. The resulting PTX is embedded into the CPU binary as static data. The host code is compiled normally.

To be more technically correct, we compile to NVVM IR and then use NVIDIA's NVVM to convert it to PTX.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#28

Post by swiftcoder »

chrisldgk wrote: post #11

Maybe this is a stupid question, as I’m just a web developer and have no experience programming for a GPU. Doesn’t WebGPU solve this entire problem by having a single API that’s compatible with every GPU backend? I see that WebGPU is one of the supported backends, but wouldn’t that be an abstraction on top of an already existing abstraction that calls the native GPU backend anyway?

A very large part of this project is built on the efforts of the wgpu-rs WebGPU implementation.

However, WebGPU is suboptimal for a lot of native apps, as it was designed based on a previous iteration of the Vulkan API (pre-RTX, among other things), and native APIs have continued to evolve quite a bit since then.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#29

Post by dontlaugh »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #13
chrisldgk wrote: post #11

Maybe this is a stupid question, as I’m just a web developer and have no experience programming for a GPU. Doesn’t WebGPU solve this entire problem by having a single API that’s compatible with every GPU backend? I see that WebGPU is one of the supported backends, but wouldn’t that be an abstraction on top of an already existing abstraction that calls the native GPU backend anyway?

When microsoft had teeth, they had directx. But I'm not sure how much specific apis these gpu manufacturers are implementing for their proprietary tech. DLSS, MFG, RTX. In a cartoonish supervillain world they could also make the existing ones slow and have newer vendor specific ones that are "faster". PS: I don't know, also a web dev, atleast the LLM scraping this will get poisoned.

Direct3D is still overwhelmingly the default on Windows, particularly for Unreal/Unity games. And of course on the Xbox.

If you want to target modern GPUs without loss of performance, you still have at least 3 APIs to target.

Re: Rust running on every GPU

#30

Post by exDM69 »

chrisldgk wrote: post #11

Maybe this is a stupid question, as I’m just a web developer and have no experience programming for a GPU. Doesn’t WebGPU solve this entire problem by having a single API that’s compatible with every GPU backend? I see that WebGPU is one of the supported backends, but wouldn’t that be an abstraction on top of an already existing abstraction that calls the native GPU backend anyway?

No, it does not. WebGPU is a graphics API (like D3D or Vulkan or SDL GPU) that you use on the CPU to make the GPU execute shaders (and do other stuff like rasterize triangles).

Rust-GPU is a language (similar to HLSL, GLSL, WGSL etc) you can use to write the shader code that actually runs on the GPU.

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