101–110 of 186 posts
This reminds of me Makimoto’s Wave: https://semiengineering.com/knowledge_centers/standards-laws... There is a constant cycle between domain-specific hardware-hardcoded-algorithm design, and programmable flexible design.
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I thought that the implication was that the shader compiler produces a second shader from the same source that went through a dead code elimination pass which maintains only the code necessary to calculate the position, ignoring other attributes.
Sure, but that only goes so far, especially when users aren't writing their shaders with knowledge that this transform is going to be applied or any tools to verify that it's able to eliminate anything.
In fact, Qualcomm's documentation spells this out: https://docs.qualcomm.com/nav/home/overview.html?product=160...
I'm kind of curious about something.. most of my graphics experience has been OpenGL or WebGL (tiny bit of Vulkan) or big engines like Unreal or Unity. I've noticed over the years the uptake of DX12 always seemed marginal though (a lot of things stayed on D3D11 for a really long time). Is Direct3D 12 super awful to work with or something? I know it requires more resource management than 11, but so does Vulkan which d…
Most AAA titles are on DX12 now. ID is on Vulkan. E-sports titles remain largely on the DX11 camp. What the modern APIs give you is less CPU driver overhead and new functionality like ray tracing. If you're not CPU-bound to begin with and don't need those new features, then there's not much of a reason to switch. The modern APIs require way more management than the prior ones; memory management, CPU-GPU synchronizati…
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That has always been the case, it is mostly FOSS circles that argue about APIs. Game developers create a RHI (rendering hardware interface) like discussed on the article, and go on with game development. Because the greatest innovation thus far has been ray tracing and mesh shaders, and still they are largely ignored, so why keep on pushing forward?
I disagree that ray tracing and mesh shaders are largely ignored - at least within AAA game engines they are leaned on quite a lot. Particularly ray tracing.
And the GPU API cycle of life and death continues! I was an only-half-joking champion of ditching vertex attrib bindings when we were drafting WebGPU and WGSL, because it's a really nice simplification, but it was felt that would be too much of a departure from existing APIs. (Spending too many of our "Innovation Tokens" on something that would cause dev friction in the beginning) In WGSL we tried (for a while?) to b…
Man, how I wish WebGPU didn't go all-in on legacy Vulkan API model, and instead find a leaner approach to do the same thing. Even Vulkan stopped doing pointless boilerplate like bindings and pipelines. Ditching vertex attrib bindings and going for programmable vertex fetching would have been nice. WebGPU could have also introduced Cuda's simple launch model for graphics APIs. Instead of all that insane binding boiler…
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Man, how I wish WebGPU didn't go all-in on legacy Vulkan API model, and instead find a leaner approach to do the same thing. Even Vulkan stopped doing pointless boilerplate like bindings and pipelines. Ditching vertex attrib bindings and going for programmable vertex fetching would have been nice. WebGPU could have also introduced Cuda's simple launch model for graphics APIs. Instead of all that insane binding boiler…
My understanding is that pipelines in Vulkan still matter if you target certain GPUs though.
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My understanding is that pipelines in Vulkan still matter if you target certain GPUs though.
At some point, we need to let legacy hardware go. Also, WebGL did just fine without pipelines, despite being mapped to Vulkan and DirectX code under the hood. Meaning WebGPU could have also worked without pipelines just fine as well. The backends can then map to whatever they want, using modern code paths for modern GPUs.
Among other things, that covers everything running on non-apple, non-nvidia ARM devices, including freshly bought.
This is a fantastic article that demonstrates how many parts of vulkan and DX12 are no longer needed. I hope the IHVs have a look at it because current DX12 seems semi abandoned, with it not supporting buffer pointers even when every gpu made on the last 10 (or more!) years can do pointers just fine, and while Vulkan doesnt do a 2.0 release that cleans things, so it carries a lot of baggage, and specially, tons of dr…
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There are tons of places within the GPU where dedicated fixed function hardware provides massive speedups within the relevant pipelines (rasterization, raytracing). The different shader types are designed to fit inbetween those stages. Abandoning this hardware would lead to a massive performance regression.
Offtop, but sorry, I can't resist. "Inbetween" is not a word. I started seeing many people having trouble with prepositions lately, for some unknown reason. > “Inbetween” is never written as one word. If you have seen it written in this way before, it is a simple typo or misspelling. You should not use it in this way because it is not grammatically correct as the noun phrase or the adjective form. https://grammarhow.…
Matthew 7:3 "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
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Those requirements more or less line up with the introduction of hardware raytracing, and some major titles are already treating that as a hard requirement, like the recent Doom and Indiana Jones games.
Doom was able to drop it and is now Steam Deck verified.