Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle • Hacker News Board

Re: Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle

#21

Post by bigdubs » Thu, Mar 12, 2015, 9:53 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #5

Very interesting post. So ... the subtext that a lot of people aren't calling out explicitly is that this round of new APIs has been done in cooperation with the big engines. The Mantle spec is effectively written by Johan Andersson at DICE, and the Khronos Vulkan spec basically pulls Aras P at Unity, Niklas S at Epic, and a couple guys at Valve into the fold. This begs the question: what about DirectX 12 and Apple's…

totally unrelated, this has been sort of my experience switching to golang as well.

Re: Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle

#22

Post by pothibo » Thu, Mar 12, 2015, 9:53 PM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #20

pothibo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the documentation for the hardware is not open source. You need to sign very strict papers to be able to look at the hardware documentation which means few selected people have access to it which means not much support, etc. Can't remember why I know this but it was something related to my linux open source back in the days.

I think things have shifted a bit away from that. IIRC, AMD's pretty free with the documentation for everything that isn't part of the DRM-enforcement chain, so their open source drivers are mostly lacking in manpower. NVidia just won't release the docs at all, so the open source drivers for them are reverse-engineered and plagued by problems like an inability to get most GPUs out of power-saving mode. I'm not sure h…

Good to know it's moving towards a more open environment. Also good to know that my memory wasn't playing tricks on me. Thank you for the update.

Re: Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle

#23

Post by wtallis » Thu, Mar 12, 2015, 9:54 PM UTC

dikaiosune wrote: post #17

angersock wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, this suits big engine and AAA studios really well, right, because they can spare that time. Indies are going to increasingly look at the web and other interfaces because of the easy layers.

This might hold true if you're only looking at the actual design/code side of the lifecycle, but it sounds like a key point of the new APIs is to make new projects more testable, debuggable and optimizable. Given most project spend inordinate amounts of time in the those three activities (and it sounds like games moreso), this should be a win for everyone.

And even if it isn't, the video game industry just got revolutionized by most of the major engines becoming free, so indie devs don't have to drop down to a lower level of abstraction in order to have a chance at competitive performance.

Re: Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle

#24

Post by emilsedgh » Thu, Mar 12, 2015, 9:57 PM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #10

pavlov wrote: post #5

Very interesting post. So ... the subtext that a lot of people aren't calling out explicitly is that this round of new APIs has been done in cooperation with the big engines. The Mantle spec is effectively written by Johan Andersson at DICE, and the Khronos Vulkan spec basically pulls Aras P at Unity, Niklas S at Epic, and a couple guys at Valve into the fold. This begs the question: what about DirectX 12 and Apple's…

About your last paragraph, I would say that that is even more important to optimize and to make low level layers for than graphical game engines (believe it or not :)). The thing is while gaming is seen as a "performance critical" application, where it is natural to want the maximum performance to be squeezed out of your hardware, Web development is just a behemoth of inefficiency, and we think that that is the norm…

Write your whole webapp in WebGL?

Edit: Seriously, how feasible is that? Creating a GUI framework on top of WebGL and creating an abstraction layer (which the original article advises against) would be a huge performance boost comparing to current webpages, wouldn't it?

Re: Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle

#25

Post by cwyers » Thu, Mar 12, 2015, 10:00 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #5

Very interesting post. So ... the subtext that a lot of people aren't calling out explicitly is that this round of new APIs has been done in cooperation with the big engines. The Mantle spec is effectively written by Johan Andersson at DICE, and the Khronos Vulkan spec basically pulls Aras P at Unity, Niklas S at Epic, and a couple guys at Valve into the fold. This begs the question: what about DirectX 12 and Apple's…

"This begs the question: what about DirectX 12 and Apple's Metal? If they didn't have similar engine developer involvement, that's clearly a point against DX12/Metal support in the long run."

There's several parts to this. DirectX 12 is going to run on Windows 10, and its adoption by developers is probably going to be entirely driven by how much of their target audience can be persuaded to upgrade from Windows 7. If Windows ships with better DirectX 12 drivers than Vulkan drivers (and I would bet that it will), then you'll probably see more AAA games written to DirectX12. Metal, likewise, is the preferred graphics API for reaching iPhone users, which are plentiful and (compared to Android users) lucrative.

Re: Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle

#26

Post by lambda » Thu, Mar 12, 2015, 10:02 PM UTC

  These are the vanishingly few people who have actually 
  seen the source to a game, the driver it's running on, 
  and the Windows kernel it's running on, and the full 
  specs for the hardware. Nobody else has that kind of 
  access or engineering ability.

One option is to release the source of the drivers, making it possible for motivated engine developers to do this without explicit access to AMD developers.

If they did this on Linux as well, then developers would have access to the full stack, in order to be able to learn about how the lower levels work and more easily track the problems down without simply a whole lot of trial and error on a black box.

Re: Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle

#27

Post by jsheard » Thu, Mar 12, 2015, 10:03 PM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #10

pavlov wrote: post #5

Very interesting post. So ... the subtext that a lot of people aren't calling out explicitly is that this round of new APIs has been done in cooperation with the big engines. The Mantle spec is effectively written by Johan Andersson at DICE, and the Khronos Vulkan spec basically pulls Aras P at Unity, Niklas S at Epic, and a couple guys at Valve into the fold. This begs the question: what about DirectX 12 and Apple's…

About your last paragraph, I would say that that is even more important to optimize and to make low level layers for than graphical game engines (believe it or not :)). The thing is while gaming is seen as a "performance critical" application, where it is natural to want the maximum performance to be squeezed out of your hardware, Web development is just a behemoth of inefficiency, and we think that that is the norm…

Isn't Google's Native Client the Vulkan of the web? Or rather wasn't it, given adoption outside of Chrome is unlikely to ever happen.

Re: Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle

#28

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 12, 2015, 10:04 PM UTC

emilsedgh wrote: post #24

andrepd wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About your last paragraph, I would say that that is even more important to optimize and to make low level layers for than graphical game engines (believe it or not :)). The thing is while gaming is seen as a "performance critical" application, where it is natural to want the maximum performance to be squeezed out of your hardware, Web development is just a behemoth of inefficiency, and we think that that is the norm…

Write your whole webapp in WebGL? Edit: Seriously, how feasible is that? Creating a GUI framework on top of WebGL and creating an abstraction layer (which the original article advises against) would be a huge performance boost comparing to current webpages, wouldn't it?

[deleted]

Re: Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle

#29

Post by venomsnake » Thu, Mar 12, 2015, 10:06 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #5

Very interesting post. So ... the subtext that a lot of people aren't calling out explicitly is that this round of new APIs has been done in cooperation with the big engines. The Mantle spec is effectively written by Johan Andersson at DICE, and the Khronos Vulkan spec basically pulls Aras P at Unity, Niklas S at Epic, and a couple guys at Valve into the fold. This begs the question: what about DirectX 12 and Apple's…

>I wonder if/when web developers will reach a similar point of software layer implosion. "Easy to code against, but a bitch and a half to debug or tune"

for me it was 3 years ago in web. And 6 years ago in Enterprise java.

Re: Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle

#30

Post by mreiland » Thu, Mar 12, 2015, 10:06 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #5

Very interesting post. So ... the subtext that a lot of people aren't calling out explicitly is that this round of new APIs has been done in cooperation with the big engines. The Mantle spec is effectively written by Johan Andersson at DICE, and the Khronos Vulkan spec basically pulls Aras P at Unity, Niklas S at Epic, and a couple guys at Valve into the fold. This begs the question: what about DirectX 12 and Apple's…

That last quote really resonates with my experience of software dev in general. "easy" API's generally do it by making a ton of assumptions. Modifying those assumptions becomes a huge pain point and that's if the API even allows you to modify that particular assumption.