Former Nvidia Dev's Thoughts on Vulkan/Mantle

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 6:50 AM 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…

Post by hitlin37 » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 8:09 AM 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…

Post by davedx » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 8:10 AM UTC

13years wrote: post #111

davedx wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I hope it works out well. A whole new class of apps and performance might become real. I just wonder how well text performance will be. Would be awesome to get near native speed with editors like Brackets and Atom.

Post by Arelius » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 9:03 AM UTC

yoklov wrote: post #34

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.

Post by buster » Fri, Mar 13, 2015, 10:21 AM UTC

sounds wrote: post #44

korethr wrote: post #19

To me, this neatly explains why in just about every performance comparison of video drivers in Linux shows the proprietary drivers having an edge, even if only a slight one. I've never actually dived into the source code for the open source video drivers but I'm now curious how much time the devs of the open-source drivers have to spend on anticipating and routing around the brain damage of the programs calling them.…

I've spent a fair bit of time in the open source radeon and nouveau drivers and I never noticed any workarounds in place solely to fix a broken client. Open source driver developers don't have the time or resources to pull off a stunt like that!