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No Graphics API

sebastianaaltonen.com

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Re: No Graphics API

#71

Post by Q6T46nT668w6i3m »

pjmlp wrote: post #17

I have followed Sebastian Aaltonen's work for quite a while now, so maybe I am a bit biased, this is however a great article. I also think that the way forward is to go back to software rendering, however this time around those algorithms and data structures are actually hardware accelerated as he points out. Note that this is an ongoing trend on VFX industry already, about 5 years ago OTOY ported their OctaneRender…

But they still rely on fixed functions for a handful of essential ops (e.g., intersection).

Re: No Graphics API

#73

Post by bogwog »

Bengalilol wrote: post #30

After reading this article, I feel like I've witnessed a historic moment.

Most of it went over my head, but there's so much knowledge and expertise on display here that it makes me proud that this person I've never met is out there proving that software development isn't entirely full of clowns.

Re: No Graphics API

#74

Post by qingcharles »

I started my career writing software 3D renderers before switching to Direct3D in the later 90s. What I wonder is if all of this is going to just get completely washed away and made totally redundant by the incoming flood of hallucinated game rendering?

Will it be possible to hallucinate the frame of a game at a similar speed to rendering it with a mesh and textures?

We're already seeing the hybrid version of this where you render a lower res mesh and hallucinate the upscaled, more detailed, more realistic looking skin over the top.

I wouldn't want to be in the game engine business right now :/

Re: No Graphics API

#75

Post by jsheard »

qingcharles wrote: post #74

I started my career writing software 3D renderers before switching to Direct3D in the later 90s. What I wonder is if all of this is going to just get completely washed away and made totally redundant by the incoming flood of hallucinated game rendering? Will it be possible to hallucinate the frame of a game at a similar speed to rendering it with a mesh and textures? We're already seeing the hybrid version of this wh…

You can't really do a whole lot of inference in 16ms on consumer hardware. Not to say that inference isn't useful in realtime graphics, DLSS has proven itself well enough, but that's a very small model laser-targetted at one specific problem and even that takes a few milliseconds to do its thing. Fitting behemoth generative models into those time constraints seems like an uphill battle.

Re: No Graphics API

#76

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

qingcharles wrote: post #74

I started my career writing software 3D renderers before switching to Direct3D in the later 90s. What I wonder is if all of this is going to just get completely washed away and made totally redundant by the incoming flood of hallucinated game rendering? Will it be possible to hallucinate the frame of a game at a similar speed to rendering it with a mesh and textures? We're already seeing the hybrid version of this wh…

I just assumed hallucinated rendering was a stepping stone to training AGIs or something. No one is actually seriously trying to build games that way, are they? Seems horribly inefficient at best, and incoherent at worst.

Re: No Graphics API

#77

Post by masspro »

stevage wrote: post #53
opminion wrote: post #15

The article is missing this motivation paragraph, taken from the blog index: > Graphics APIs and shader languages have significantly increased in complexity over the past decade. It’s time to start discussing how to strip down the abstractions to simplify development, improve performance, and prepare for future GPU workloads.

Thanks, I had trouble figuring out what the article was about, lost in all the "here's how I used AI and had the article screened by industry insiders".

I read that whole (single) paragraph as “I made really, really, really sure I didn’t violate any NDAs by doing these things to confirm everything had a public source”

Re: No Graphics API

#78

Post by Groxx »

kllrnohj wrote: post #68
jsheard wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, I think the jury is still out on whether unifying desktop and mobile graphics APIs is really worth it. In practice Vulkan written to take full advantage of desktop GPUs is wildly incompatible with most mobile GPUs, so there's fragmentation between them regardless.

It's quite useful for things like skia or piet-gpu/vello or the general category of "things that use the GPU that aren't games" (image/video editors, effects pipelines, compute, etc etc etc)

would it also apply to stuff like the Switch, and relatively high-end "mobile" gaming in general? (I'm not sure what those chips actually look like tho)

there are also some arm laptops that just run Qualcomm chips, the same as some phones (tablets with a keyboard, basically, but a bit more "PC"-like due to running Windows).

AFAICT the fusion seems likely to be an accurate prediction.

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