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Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle

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

#31

Post by jeremiep »

mreiland wrote: post #30
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.

Exactly. This is why I like Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy [1] so much. Basically with easy constructs it becomes harder to build simple systems, even though the simple constructs are harder to learn.

[1]: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

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

#32

Post by lambda »

backinside wrote: post #14

How come, that the open source drivers did not show much better performance?

A long time without access to hardware documentation, and even now that that is sometimes more forthcoming, simply a lot fewer resources than the proprietary drivers have. The proprietary drivers have many years worth of several full-time developers, testers, access to hardware engineers to solve problems together, etc.

The open source drivers have frequently been written by volunteers, or professionals who do it as only a small part of their job, have had to spend more time and effort reverse-engineering rather than having documentation and the ability to talk to hardware engineers, and are perpetually at least a few months to a few years behind the proprietary developers who had access to all of this before the hardware even came out.

It's impressive what the open source drivers have managed to accomplish, and they are improving, but they are severely handicapped compared to the proprietary drivers.

This excludes, of course, Intel, but Intel focuses on lower end integrated graphics rather than high-end discrete graphics, so it's not quite comparable.

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

#33

Post by venomsnake »

pothibo wrote: post #12

> What has finally been made clear is that it's okay to have difficult to code APIs, if the end result just works. So true and yet, we have all those crazy JavaScript frameworks trying to abstract everything away from developers. There's a lesson in there.

You cannot abstract away complexity. This is a lesson people relearn every 2-3 years or so.

From the javascript frameworks - I use only backbone and jquery - first as a simple router, second for easy dom traversal.

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

#34

Post by yoklov »

vcarl wrote: post #3

This is interesting, it's good to hear the opinion of somebody who's actually programmed against the APIs. I think the increase in exposed complexity is probably a good thing. The AAA studios have proved that they're able and willing to throw engineering resources at tough problems, so actually allowing them to directly interact with a lower level of code is probably a good thing. I'm sure there's a counterargument t…

> when's the last time an indie game directly programmed against DirectX or OpenGL (barring webGL)?

I don't work in indie, but my understanding is that this is still pretty common, especially for games with any budget at all.

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

#35

Post by mreiland »

jeremiep wrote: post #31
mreiland wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. This is why I like Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy [1] so much. Basically with easy constructs it becomes harder to build simple systems, even though the simple constructs are harder to learn. [1]: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

yep, I love that talk and I find myself pointing people towards it all the time :)

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

#36

Post by davedx »

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…

Hi, I'm working on a library to allow something like this (rendering web UI's with a WebGL backend).

It's in very early stages. Feedback is very welcome:

https://github.com/davedx/lustro

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

#37

Post by [deleted] »

lambda wrote: post #26

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…

[deleted]

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

#38

Post by davedx »

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?

It's definitely feasible! A goal for my side project is to give developers a React-like declarative UI with a WebGL rendering backend that abstracts away the graphics programming.

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

#39

Post by [deleted] »

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

#40

Post by yoklov »

dietrichepp wrote: post #11
higherpurpose wrote: post #2

From the looks of it, it seems Khrono's API may actually be significant better/easier to use than DirectX? I haven't heard of DX12 getting overhauled for efficient multi-threading or great multi-GPU support. DX12 probably brings many of the same improvements Mantle brought, but Vulkan seems to go quite a bit beyond that. Also, I assume DX12 will be stuck with some less than pleasant DX10/DX11 legacy code as well.

It sounds like Vulkan is not going to be easy to use. If anything, it is going to be harder to use. For example, in OpenGL, you can upload a texture with glTexImage2D(), then draw with glDrawElements(), then delete it glDeleteTextures(). The draw command won't be complete yet, but the driver will free the memory once it's no longer being used. It sounds like with Vulkan, you'll need to allocate GPU memory for your te…

Honestly for well designed modern-ish renderers this sort of thing tends not to be as big of a deal as it might sound.

In general most of the additional steps are things people already do. e.g. you shouldn't be deleting textures that are in use anyway because not all drivers have always handled that well, etc, managing the equivalent of a command buffer is common, even when the actual command buffer isn't something you have access to...

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