Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming • Hacker News Board

Re: Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming

#21

Post by chrisbennet » Fri, Jul 25, 2014, 5:28 PM UTC

dsugarman wrote: post #6

I am a little confused, it seems like you are proposing an interactive CUDA guide, but there is no mention of CUDA at all. Having spent a lot of time in graphics, I feel like better test environments for GPU programming will go a long way towards higher market adoption, it's a nightmare debugging sometimes

Shaders != CUDA

Shaders have there own stripped down C language to run on parts of the graphics pipeline as apposed to CUDA which is a much richer framework with a lot more control (and knowledge) of the GPU it's running on.

CUDA is an NVidia only GPU framework. Shaders are used in conjunction with graphics frameworks like OpenGL, DirectX(?) and WebGL.

The interactive nature is great. Normally shaders are a just a big string or file that gets submitted to the graphics card driver to get compiled and run on the GPU.

Re: Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming

#22

Post by tizzdogg » Fri, Jul 25, 2014, 5:30 PM UTC

sparkie wrote: post #8

> New ways of programming If you wanna be sincere about this, I think you should have a section dedicated to Gezira, and not only the more traditional imperative styles of graphics programming. The style of GUI that came out of PARC is no longer "modern", and has problems with modern development styles (e.g, single-threaded global event loops makes writing concurrent programs difficult). If you're not familiar with i…

How is Gezira relevant to the topic of this book? The title says the book is about "graphics programming", but from the description it seems clear that it is primarily about GPU programming, and pixel shaders in particular.

I'm not familiar with Gezira, but from what little info I could find it seems to compile to C code and runs entirely on the CPU. They say an OpenCL backend is planned for the future but not there yet. I agree it might be a good environment to learn about graphics concepts in general, but it wouldnt really teach anything about the details of GPU programming.

Re: Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming

#23

Post by monokrome » Fri, Jul 25, 2014, 5:38 PM UTC

This is cool.

Seeing the examples rendered is nice, but changing the code doesn't work in Firefox. Seems like that might confuse a lot of people.

Re: Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming

#24

Post by coderzach » Fri, Jul 25, 2014, 5:49 PM UTC

This is great, but there's no where for me to put an email or something to stay in the loop :-(

Re: Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming

#25

Post by vajrabum » Fri, Jul 25, 2014, 5:54 PM UTC

FYI, the web site doesn't seem to work in Safari.

Re: Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming

#26

Post by wtallis » Fri, Jul 25, 2014, 6:40 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #17

sparkie wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been a number of attempts to create hardware agonostic languages for GPGPU programming - examples are Brook ( http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/brookgpu/lang.html ), and Harlan ( https://github.com/eholk/harlan/wiki/Language-Overview ), although there are many others. None seem to take off, as with most languages - and OpenCL seems like it's here to stay (perhaps because it requires little new learning on…

No, the primary target is PTX in CUDA devices. This is one of the reasons OpenCL is still playing catchup with CUDA. Thanks to PTX, you can target CUDA directly with C++ and Fortran, besides a few other languages. OpenCL only this year got SPIR.

PTX is certainly more suitable as an intermediate representation than OpenCL's dialect of C, but PTX obviously doesn't and never will fulfill the requirements of being the low-level portable target for high-level languages.

NVidia's early-mover advantage is significant, but software tied to only their hardware will never be able to achieve the kind of status that the netlib stuff has. The only question is whether the gold-standard numerical libraries a decade from now will have multiple backends, or a single non-CUDA backend.

Re: Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming

#27

Post by amf314 » Fri, Jul 25, 2014, 6:54 PM UTC

vajrabum wrote: post #25

FYI, the web site doesn't seem to work in Safari.

Or Chrome (at least the interactive example did not).

Re: Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming

#28

Post by smrtinsert » Fri, Jul 25, 2014, 6:56 PM UTC

SomeoneWeird wrote: post #13

You should look at https://github.com/stackgl/shader-school - it is very similar.

And starred, thank you! I really would love to be able to think in trig like some of these guys can (looking at you iq)

Re: Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming

#29

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Jul 25, 2014, 6:57 PM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #26

pjmlp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the primary target is PTX in CUDA devices. This is one of the reasons OpenCL is still playing catchup with CUDA. Thanks to PTX, you can target CUDA directly with C++ and Fortran, besides a few other languages. OpenCL only this year got SPIR.

PTX is certainly more suitable as an intermediate representation than OpenCL's dialect of C, but PTX obviously doesn't and never will fulfill the requirements of being the low-level portable target for high-level languages. NVidia's early-mover advantage is significant, but software tied to only their hardware will never be able to achieve the kind of status that the netlib stuff has. The only question is whether the…

Funny I had the impression CUDA is winning hands down on HPC.

Re: Proposal For An Interactive Introduction to Graphics Programming

#30

Post by smrtinsert » Fri, Jul 25, 2014, 7:23 PM UTC

This has been out there for a while iirc. I hope something comes of it. Even the potential chapter list is great though for those of us struggling to learn pixel shaders well.