3 ms·

I think Vulkan / DX12 is explicitly designed to make making another abstraction on it possible? It's possible to make a full app on it without any assistant, bu

I think Vulkan / DX12 is explicitly designed to make making another abstraction on it possible? It's possible to make a full app on it without any assistant, but it's not the easiest way to use it. For example, you may make a opengl emulation layer on directX, but not the other way around. And dx12/vulkan is designed to be the underlying one (While hide some hardware specified gotcha).

cyber_kinetist 3y ago
The problem is... even it being low-level it isn't really a good abstraction. It mainly maps well with how AMD's hardware works but not NVIDIA's - NVIDIA has some inherent dynamic state baked into their hardware that makes the whole pipeline object thing a bit inefficient in theirs. But even ignoring this, it's a bit disheartening seeing all the graphics engineers working on game engines building similar things on top of it in suboptimal ways (ex. the pipeline cache), when it could have been just done at the driver level from the start! The reality is that most graphics application developers really do not care too much about the intricacies of low-level device management - and the ones who actually care are also building abstractions around it since they too don't really want to deal with this. Vulkan / DX12 basically feels like the driver developers have just given up and dumped the whole responsibility of managing a GPU onto the application developers. It's a bit like how even the best performance-oriented engineers rarely go down to directly writing assembly to optimize their C/C++ code - sure you can do that, but excluding the rare hot spots it's mostly a waste of time. It is incredibly useful to get a debugger/profiler and observe how your code is compiled down to, but actually writing it is cumbersome and requires too much of a discipline with too many footguns.

3 ms·

I think Vulkan / DX12 is explicitly designed to make making another abstraction on it possible? It's possible to make a full app on it without any assistant, bu

by mmis1000 3y ago

cyber_kinetist 3y ago
The problem is... even it being low-level it isn't really a good abstraction. It mainly maps well with how AMD's hardware works but not NVIDIA's - NVIDIA has some inherent dynamic state baked into their hardware that makes the whole pipeline object thing a bit inefficient in theirs. But even ignoring this, it's a bit disheartening seeing all the graphics engineers working on game engines building similar things on top of it in suboptimal ways (ex. the pipeline cache), when it could have been just done at the driver level from the start! The reality is that most graphics application developers really do not care too much about the intricacies of low-level device management - and the ones who actually care are also building abstractions around it since they too don't really want to deal with this. Vulkan / DX12 basically feels like the driver developers have just given up and dumped the whole responsibility of managing a GPU onto the application developers. It's a bit like how even the best performance-oriented engineers rarely go down to directly writing assembly to optimize their C/C++ code - sure you can do that, but excluding the rare hot spots it's mostly a waste of time. It is incredibly useful to get a debugger/profiler and observe how your code is compiled down to, but actually writing it is cumbersome and requires too much of a discipline with too many footguns.