4 ms·

Shader ISA != command processor

• rwallace 9y ago
  So you're saying the open ISA still doesn't allow access to the command processor? What sort of things does that preclude? Suppose you decided to write a game directly to the hardware instead of via DirectX or OpenGL, or a molecular dynamics simulation directly to the hardware instead of via CUDA, what would happen?
  • kayamon 9y ago
    If you tried to do it directly, you'd a) find it very hard as it's largely undocumented, and b) it'd probably break when the vendors decide to change it without warning on their new GPUs. As for applications, well I dunno. One particular example would be Render To Vertex Buffer, something that ATI cards used to expose an extension for but NVidia cards didn't. Even though basically _any_ GPU could do it if the driver decided to. A better use would be to allow the GPU to read the game's scene structure directly without even needing an API in-between.