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No Graphics API

sebastianaaltonen.com

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Re: No Graphics API

#111

Post by beAbU »

masspro wrote: post #77
stevage wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”

This is literally the second paragraph in the article. There is no need for interpretation here.

Unless the link of the article has changed since your comment?

Re: No Graphics API

#112

Post by cracki »

efilife wrote: post #42
gmueckl wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Your entire post does not once mention the form you call correct.

If you intend for people to click the link, then you might just as well delete all the prose before it.

Re: No Graphics API

#113

Post by flohofwoe »

kllrnohj wrote: post #60
jsheard wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only if you're ignoring mobile entirely. One of the things Vulkan did which would be a shame to lose is it unified desktop and mobile GPU APIs.

> One of the things Vulkan did which would be a shame to lose is it unified desktop and mobile GPU APIs.

In hindsight it really would have been better to have a separate VulkanES which is specialized for mobile GPUs.

Re: No Graphics API

#114

Post by flohofwoe »

overgard wrote: post #70

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…

> but so does Vulkan which doesn't seem to have the same issue

Vulkan has the same issues (and more) as D3D12, you just don't hear much about it because there are hardly any games built directly on top of Vulkan. Vulkan is mainly useful as Proton backend on Linux.

Re: No Graphics API

#115

Post by flohofwoe »

m-schuetz wrote: post #106
p_l wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Also, WebGL did just fine without pipelines, despite being mapped to Vulkan and DirectX code under the hood.

...at the cost of creating PSOs at random times which is an expensive operation :/

Re: No Graphics API

#116

Post by deliciousturkey »

Groxx wrote: post #78
kllrnohj wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Switch has its own API. The GPU also doesn't have limitations you'd associate with "mobile". In terms of architecture, it's a full desktop GPU with desktop-class features.

Re: No Graphics API

#117

Post by m-schuetz »

flohofwoe wrote: post #115
m-schuetz wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Also, WebGL did just fine without pipelines, despite being mapped to Vulkan and DirectX code under the hood. ...at the cost of creating PSOs at random times which is an expensive operation :/

No longer an issue with dynamic rendering and shader objects. And never was an issue with OpenGL. Static pipelines are an artificial problem that Vulkan imposed for no good reason, and which they reverted in recent years.

Re: No Graphics API

#118

Post by Joker_vD »

Antibabelic wrote: post #109
efilife wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

"Offtop" is not a word. It's not in any English dictionary I could find and doesn't appear in any published literature. 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?"

Oh, it's a transliteration of Russian "офтоп", which itself started as a borrowing of "off-topic" from English (but as a noun instead of an adjective/stative) and then went some natural linguistic developments, namely loss of a hyphen and degemination, surface analysis of the trailing "-ic" as Russian suffix "-ик" [0], and its subsequent removal to obtain the supposed "original, non-derived" form.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-%D0%B8%D0%BA#Russian

Re: No Graphics API

#120

Post by flohofwoe »

m-schuetz wrote: post #117
flohofwoe wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, WebGL did just fine without pipelines, despite being mapped to Vulkan and DirectX code under the hood. ...at the cost of creating PSOs at random times which is an expensive operation :/

No longer an issue with dynamic rendering and shader objects. And never was an issue with OpenGL. Static pipelines are an artificial problem that Vulkan imposed for no good reason, and which they reverted in recent years.

Going entirely back to the granular GL-style state soup would have significant 'usability problems'. It's too easy to accidentially leak incorrect state from a previous draw call.

IMHO a small number of immutable state objects is the best middle ground (similar to D3D11 or Metal, but reshuffled like described in Seb's post).

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