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Unlike low level SIMD instructions, GPUs work on higher level APIs: Vulkan, DirectX, OpenGL. How that gets interpreted by the GPU changes with driver updates. T

Unlike low level SIMD instructions, GPUs work on higher level APIs: Vulkan, DirectX, OpenGL. How that gets interpreted by the GPU changes with driver updates. That's how Intel Arc GPU performance started off in a somewhat bad state yet are steadily improving. Changes in interpretation also mean changes in shaders, so you can't just take shaders on one version of a driver and use it on another. Internal pipelines can vary between GPU architecture too. Currently AMD ships a different branch of their own Windows drivers for the new RDNA3 architecture GPUs (RX 7000 series). So precompiled shaders probably work won't between architectures.

Aardwolf 4y ago
But why do they change this per driver update? That sounds horrible to do! CPU's are not changing their instructions based on driver updates either. IMHO, time for CPU's to offer thousands-of-floats-wide SIMD instruction sets instead of the measily 512 bits, that can do the same as GPU's but are way more stable, and get rid of those annoying, version-of-driver-dependent, install-100-python-libraries-to-use-them GPU's.
- incrudible 4y ago
  Performance. Vendors will literally go in and hack the shaders for major titles. Also, drivers have bugs. GPUs will never be outperformed by a CPU with wider SIMD. Intel learned that the hard way with Larrabee. They are on a different place on the pareto front.
  - Aardwolf 4y ago
    Performance at the cost of stutter. So not really performance... When did compiling of shaders become a thing? Nvidia GeForce had shaders in the year 2001 but I don't remember ever seeing this then. The first time I saw compiling of shaders happen was in 2017 in a console emulator I think. So how did it work before then, and what exactly has this compiling now improved compared to before?
    - incrudible 4y ago
      It only stutters the first time the shader is used, but modern games use a lot of shaders and they are more complex. In modern APIs it is not just shaders but a combination of shaders and state.

Aardwolf 4y ago

But why do they change this per driver update? That sounds horrible to do! CPU's are not changing their instructions based on driver updates either. IMHO, time for CPU's to offer thousands-of-floats-wide SIMD instruction sets instead of the measily 512 bits, that can do the same as GPU's but are way more stable, and get rid of those annoying, version-of-driver-dependent, install-100-python-libraries-to-use-them GPU's.

incrudible 4y ago
Performance. Vendors will literally go in and hack the shaders for major titles. Also, drivers have bugs. GPUs will never be outperformed by a CPU with wider SIMD. Intel learned that the hard way with Larrabee. They are on a different place on the pareto front.
- Aardwolf 4y ago
  Performance at the cost of stutter. So not really performance... When did compiling of shaders become a thing? Nvidia GeForce had shaders in the year 2001 but I don't remember ever seeing this then. The first time I saw compiling of shaders happen was in 2017 in a console emulator I think. So how did it work before then, and what exactly has this compiling now improved compared to before?
  - incrudible 4y ago
    It only stutters the first time the shader is used, but modern games use a lot of shaders and they are more complex. In modern APIs it is not just shaders but a combination of shaders and state.