Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:10 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.

Post by zaroth » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 4:45 AM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #16

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…

In its early days, OpenGL benefited in many ways from being a "forward-looking" API that exposed far more functionality than was implemented by graphics hardware. Software that used those features got faster throughout the 90s with no rewriting needed as that functionality became available on GPUs. (Of course, software like games that wanted to be fast now just avoided those features.) When graphics hardware started…

Post by pandaman » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 5:30 AM UTC

jeremiep wrote: post #47

malkia wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this talk, and Rich Hickey's talks in general, but I think this goes beyond that. At one point you want full control of the HW, much like you did with game consoles.. On the other you want security: This model must work in a sandboxed (os, process, vm, threads, sharing etc.) environment, along with security checks (oldest one that I remember was making sure vertex index buffers given to the driver/api must not…

Security is actually much easier to implement on the GPU than on the CPU. For the simple reason that GPU code has to be pure in order to get this degree of parallelism. A shader is nothing more than a transform applied to inputs (attributes, uniforms and varyings) in order to give outputs (colors, depth, stencil). Invalid data would simply cause a GPU task to fail while the other tasks happily continue to be executed…

Post by Joky » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 5:47 AM UTC

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…

Post by likeclockwork » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 5:56 AM UTC

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…