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

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

#91

Post by GhotiFish » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 1:24 AM UTC

venomsnake wrote: post #29

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.

No idea why you were downvoted. Maybe people percieved it as an implication of "I knew better 3 years ago", but it's not that.

It's hard to imagine someone working with Enterprise Java and thinking "This isn't helping. This isn't making things more reliable".

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

#92

Post by interpol_p » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 1:26 AM 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?

Wouldn't that kill accessibility, selectable text, being able to call system services (i.e., on OS X hitting cmd+shift+D to get a dictionary definition of a word), any extensions which modify the page hierarchy, automatic translation/localisation, and so on.

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

#93

Post by ggchappell » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 1:28 AM UTC

> Part of the goal is simply to stop hiding what's actually going on in the software from game programmers. Debugging drivers has never been possible for us, which meant a lot of poking and prodding and experimenting to figure out exactly what it is that is making the render pipeline of a game slow.

This is really sad. Imagine if someone were pushing a new file API with the justification that storage-device drivers were full of bugs.

I get a similar feeling whenever I read one of those "CSS trick that works on all browsers!" articles. Yes, it's nice that you can build a thing of beauty on top of broken abstractions, but ....

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

#94

Post by rys » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 1:36 AM UTC

higherpurpose wrote: post #58

cwyers wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

We don't know yet whether Apple will adopt Vulkan or not. Vulkan is not just a direct competitor to Metal, but also an evolution of OpenGL ES, and so far Apple has adopted OpenGL ES.

Vulkan is purposely not an evolution of OpenGL ES. It's a clean break from that API and shares nothing in common.

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

#95

Post by greggman » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 1:36 AM UTC

jallmann wrote: post #86

near wrote: post #56

The idea that nVidia and AMD are detecting your games, and then replacing shaders, optimizing around bugs, etc should be absolutely terrifying. And vice versa, the idea of having to fix every major game's incredibly broken code is equally terrifying. And it's a huge hit to all of us indie devs, who don't get the five-star treatment to maximize performance of our games. So overall, I'd say this is a step in the right…

> The idea that nVidia and AMD are detecting your games, and then replacing shaders, optimizing around bugs, etc should be absolutely terrifying. Actually it's par for the course, if you care about backwards compatibility. Raymond Chen has many, many stories about the absolutely heroic lengths Microsoft has gone to ensure that popular, yet broken, programs continue to work smoothly between Windows upgrades [1][2][3][…

I'd argue there's also a bigger problem. There have never been conformance tests for OpenGL until recently. They finally wrote some for ES and then finally started backporting them to OpenGL.

Worse, they rarely check the limits, only the basics. They also they didn't check anything related to multiple contexts. The point being the drivers are/were full of bugs on the edge cases.

Testing works. If there were tests that were relatively comprehensive and that rejected drivers that failed the edge cases they'd gone a long way to mitigating these issues because the dev's apps wouldn't have worked.

There's also just poor api design. Maybe poor is a strong word. Example, uniform locations are ints so some apps assume they'll be assigned in order then fail when they get to a machine where they're not. Another example, you're allowed to make up resource ids. OpenGL does not require you to call `glCreateXXX` just call `glBindXXX` with any id you please. But of course if you do that maybe some id you use is already being used for something else. So id=1 works on some driver but not some other.

I'm excited about Vulkan but I'm a little worried it's actually going to make the driver bug issues worse. If using it in a spec compliant way is even harder than OpenGL and your app just happens to work on certain drivers other driver vendors will again be forced to implement workarounds.

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

#96

Post by mhomde » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 1:42 AM UTC

venomsnake wrote: post #33

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.

I think you can... but it's really hard to design an architecture that's both powerful and easy to use. It's important to have different layers of abstraction and allow developers to develop at the level of abstraction needed to obtain the control they need.

Often it's also a question of how things are composed, not just how much they're abstracted away. If you're use case dictates that you need to separately control something that's been composed into one thing then you're usually out of luck

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

#97

Post by wtallis » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 1:47 AM UTC

greggman wrote: post #88

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…

Maybe you're optimizing for the wrong thing? Let's imagine a world where a browser is just a secure place to execute code. You get vulkan, io, networking, input, camera access in a cross platform way. So, how do search engines find any info? How do you share links to content? How do you support braille readers? Browser extensions? I'd argue those things are pretty essential to the web as we know it (well maybe not th…

The web these days is very clearly diverging into two separate things: a portable application runtime/platform, and the document publishing system it started as. I don't see any way to accomplish a clean split between the two, but it looks increasingly necessary.

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

#98

Post by mrec » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 2:02 AM UTC

jokoon wrote: post #67

What an horror show. I always was interested in game programming, but never was able to really get interested enough in graphics programming, I guess having a messy API is not an excuse, but you can really sense that CPUs and GPUs really have different compatibility stories, and that's maybe why it's not attracting enough programmers. I still hope that one day there might some unified compute architecture and CPUs wi…

> maybe why it's not attracting enough programmers

Enough for what? It's not as if the world is short of games, or game engines.

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

#99

Post by cpitman » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 2:07 AM UTC

jwildeboer wrote: post #87

Former intern that admittedly sucked at his job gets promoted to NVIDIA Dev by HN moderators because clickbait. Srsly?

I'm guessing the title came from the tweet that went about it as well (which Promit did correct, but that isn't going to matter when John Carmack retweets it): https://twitter.com/josefajardo/status/574719821469777921

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

#100

Post by drawkbox » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 2:07 AM UTC

angersock wrote: post #13

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…

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.

It is already integrated into Source 2, Unity started (they also have Metal support) and Epic also going that way.

It will make it to indie engines that aren't companies funded as well eventually.

This actually gives a ton of power to current engine developers in the market so getting them involved was a big win.

I am a huge fan of OpenGL ES / WebGL (also based on OES) and was happy that we finally had mobile win that battle but with new graphics rendering layers like Metal and optimization for mobile more needs to be done. The driver mess is a big problem and limits innovation as well.