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An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

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Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#81

Post by wtallis »

nfriedly wrote: post #69
adastra22 wrote: post #64

> frankly, I think ray tracing is a bit of a gimmick feature That's incredibly arrogant. The whole industry is adopting ray tracing, and it is a very desired feature people are upgrading video cards to get working on games they play.

I don't know, Hardware Unboxed recently did a review of 30-some games comparing the visuals with and without ray tracing, and the conclusion for the majority of them was that it wasn't worth it. There were only maybe half a dozen games where the ray tracing was an unambiguous improvement. So I think calling it "a bit of a gimmick" is accurate for many of the games that shipped in, even if not all of them.

It's also a pretty large performance hit, even when the quality improvement is subtle. A major and unfortunate consequence is that it has driven even more games to rely on upscaling and heavy post-processing, all of which tend to blur the output image and introduce artifacts and add latency.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#82

Post by ferbivore »

olliej wrote: post #75
ferbivore wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

M3 has mesh shader support. The geometry pipeline they inherited from PowerVR fundamentally doesn't support them, for reasons that go way over my head. They probably changed a good chunk of it.

> for reasons that go way over my head In fairness to you I think a lot of the stuff involving hardware goes over everyone's heads :D I've seen comments in a number of articles (and I think a few comments in this thread) saying that there are a few features in Vulcan/opengl/direct3d that were standardized ("standardized" in the D3D case?)/required that turned out to be really expensive to implement, hard to implement…

Mesh shaders are actually useful. Or at least game engine people love them, which was not the case for geometry shaders or even tessellation really. They are extremely painful to add support for though. Aside from Apple I don't think any mobile IHVs have a working implementation.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#83

Post by talldayo »

madeofpalk wrote: post #66
adastra22 wrote: post #64

> frankly, I think ray tracing is a bit of a gimmick feature That's incredibly arrogant. The whole industry is adopting ray tracing, and it is a very desired feature people are upgrading video cards to get working on games they play.

The same was true about 3D TVs. Also a gimmick.

3D TVs failed before they existed as a product category. You cannot encode enough information through stereoscopy to create a convincing or "realistic" 3D effect. The conditions for making it work have always been fickle and as 6DOF VR/AR is proving, it was never enough to be convincing anyways. Encoding two slightly different versions of a video and layering them on top of each other is a dirty hack. It is not a holistic solution to a problem they seriously intended to solve in the first place. It is a novelty designed from the bottom-up as a scarcely-usable toy.

Ray tracing is, by comparison, the holy grail of all realtime lighting effects. Global illumination makes the current raster lighting techniques look primitive by comparison. It is not an exaggeration to say that realtime graphics research largely revolves around using hacks to imitate a fraction of ray tracing's power. They are piling on pipeline-after-pipeline for ambient occlusion, realtime reflections and shadowing, bloom and glare as well as god rays and screenspace/volumetric effects. These are all things you don't have to hack together when your scene is already path tracing the environment with the physical properties accounted for. Instead of stacking hacks, you have a coherent pipeline that can be denoised, antialiased, upscaled and post-processed in one pass. No shadowmaps, no baked lighting, all realtime.

There is a reason why even Apple quit dragging their feet here - modern real-time graphics are the gimmick, ray tracing is the production-quality alternative.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#84

Post by jms55 »

nfriedly wrote: post #69
adastra22 wrote: post #64

> frankly, I think ray tracing is a bit of a gimmick feature That's incredibly arrogant. The whole industry is adopting ray tracing, and it is a very desired feature people are upgrading video cards to get working on games they play.

I don't know, Hardware Unboxed recently did a review of 30-some games comparing the visuals with and without ray tracing, and the conclusion for the majority of them was that it wasn't worth it. There were only maybe half a dozen games where the ray tracing was an unambiguous improvement. So I think calling it "a bit of a gimmick" is accurate for many of the games that shipped in, even if not all of them.

You're looking at years of careful artist and engineer work to get something that looks almost as good as pathtraced visuals. The fact that it's so good without any raytracing is a credit to the developers.

Replacing all that effort with raytracing and having one unified lighting system would be a _major_ time saver, and allows much more dynamic lighting than was previously possible. So yeah some current games don't look much better with RT, but the gameplay and art direction was designed without raytracing in mind in the first place, and had a _lot_ of work put into it to get those results.

Sure fully pathtraced graphics might not be 100% usable currently, but the fact that they're even 70% usable is amazing! And with another 3-5 years of algorithm development and hardware speedups, and developers and artists getting familiar with raytracing, we might start seeing games require raytracing.

Games typically take 4+ years to develop, so anything you're seeing coming out now was probably started when the best GPU you could buy for raytracing was an RTX 2080 TI.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#85

Post by almostgotcaught »

dtquad wrote: post #39
gigatexal wrote: post #30

Is anyone else astonished at how much is missing in the hardware and how much is emulated?

The graphics pipeline in modern GPUs are mostly a thin low-level Vulkan/Metal-like layer on top of a massively parallel CUDA-like compute architecture. It's basically all emulated. One of the reasons GPU manufacturers are unwilling to open source their drivers is because a lot of their secret sauce actually happens in software in the drivers on top of the massively parallel CUDA-like compute architecture.

I didn't read the article and don't know about Apple but that's definitely not true for everyone. Source: see amdgpu built on top of HSA.

EDIT: to be precise yes ofc every chip is a massively parallel array of compute units but CUDA has absolutely nothing to do with it and no not every company buries the functionality in the driver.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#86

Post by wtallis »

flykespice wrote: post #46
kachapopopow wrote: post #15

I always wondered about these /SubscriberLink/ links. Is sharing them considered unethical?

It's not different from shared articles here from subscriber-only newsletters being accompanied by the archived link in the topmost comment. Users here seem to not care about those "ethics"

There's nothing ethically wrong about sharing LWN subscriber links on HN when the LWN editor has repeatedly posted on HN that doing so is fine.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#87

Post by wtallis »

jms55 wrote: post #84
nfriedly wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, Hardware Unboxed recently did a review of 30-some games comparing the visuals with and without ray tracing, and the conclusion for the majority of them was that it wasn't worth it. There were only maybe half a dozen games where the ray tracing was an unambiguous improvement. So I think calling it "a bit of a gimmick" is accurate for many of the games that shipped in, even if not all of them.

You're looking at years of careful artist and engineer work to get something that looks almost as good as pathtraced visuals. The fact that it's so good without any raytracing is a credit to the developers. Replacing all that effort with raytracing and having one unified lighting system would be a _major_ time saver, and allows much more dynamic lighting than was previously possible. So yeah some current games don't…

> Sure fully pathtraced graphics might not be 100% usable currently, but the fact that they're even 70% usable is amazing!

Aside from Cyberpunk 2077 and a handful of ancient games with NVIDIA-sponsored remakes, what even offers fully path traced lighting as an option? The way it went for CP2077 makes your "70% usable" claim seem like quite an exaggeration: performance is only good if you have a current-generation GPU that cost at least $1k, the path tracing option didn't get added until years after the game originally shipped, and they had to fix a bunch of glitches resulting from the game world being built without path tracing in mind. We're clearly still years away from path tracing being broadly available among AAA games, let alone playable on any large portion of gaming PCs.

For the foreseeable future, games will still need to look good without fully path traced lighting.

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#88

Post by userbinator »

tredre3 wrote: post #52
slekker wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a fact or are you speculating?

Marcan42 accidentally posted on his twitter as Asahi Lina, and on screen Lina has accidentally shown things identifiable to Marcan (usernames, logged in mastodon account). But he clearly doesn't want to be linked/equated to her for whatever reason, so I don't know why GP brought this up beyond stirring up drama.

[flagged]

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#89

Post by Onavo »

hi_hi wrote: post #50
renewiltord wrote: post #2

The work by Alyssa R and Asahi Lina is great stuff. I have to say that a lot of this is really inscrutable unless you’re used to driver code. I wish it were much easier to write this stuff but hardware stuff is so idiosyncratic. Have to say I do enjoy all the old school style whimsy with the witch costume and whatnot.

I've just been watching her recent talk. I noticed she appears to change slides with a wave of her wand. Is there an known piece of hardware one can purchase to do this? I tried googling, but trying to find the specific result I'm interested in amongst all the blog spam garbage related to powerpoint is beyond me. Even googles own AI couldn't help. Sad times!

Is Leap Motion still a thing?

Re: An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers

#90

Post by dagmx »

ferbivore wrote: post #62
dagmx wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other hardware vendors absolutely do the same. Geometry shaders are poor performers on several other vendors for precisely the same reason

At least some Qualcomm, Imagination and Broadcom GPUs support geometry shaders in hardware. Not entirely sure about Arm. To be fair, it could be the support isn't very good.

Some do, but a lot will have their firmware actually do the translation into other compute types that align better with the hardware.
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