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I’m curious what the endgame is for GPUs. It seems like over-time they’ve been going down the road of generally-programmable parallel processors. Will there co

I’m curious what the endgame is for GPUs. It seems like over-time they’ve been going down the road of generally-programmable parallel processors. Will there come a time where, like CPUs, we land on a more general programming model and we don’t need graphics apis to introduce new features? Instead, if there’s a new graphics technique we don’t have to wait for a new DirectX feature, we can just code it ourselves?

pjmlp 2y ago
Yes, that is why OTOY is now using CUDA for their rendering engine, or Unreal Nanite based on compute shaders. Metal is based on C++14, CUDA nowadays can use most of C++20, and HLSL is going into becoming more C++ with HLSL 202x. Not sure about current state of NVN and PSSL. Regarding waiting for features, it depends, it is already so that many graphics techniques can be fully done with shaders, when that isn't the case is because some primitive is missing, which will mean that there will be always the case that you need to wait for such primitives to be made available.
- animal531 2y ago
  I'm working on an indie game that's a bit like They are Billions with a ton of enemies that need to move together nicely, find targets etc. So I've been going down quite a rabbit-hole of nearest neighbour and spatial partitioning algorithms. I started with CPU multi threading first and then went to full GPU algorithms. While the speed can be really great they suffer from too much parallelism and lack of recursion/communication etc. I still want to try CUDA/OpenCL versions as part of the test.
- CooCooCaCha 2y ago
  > there will be always the case that you need to wait for such primitives to be made available. About the features thing, when it comes to CPUs you don't really need to wait for features unless it's something like SIMD support but otherwise the programming model is general enough that I don't need to think about CPU features too much. What I'm wondering is, as GPUs become more general, will the situation become more like CPUs. For example, I saw an example where someone wrote a shader, using work graphs, to rasterize triangles. Once you can do things like that, it seems like the need for new primitives is far less.

pjmlp 2y ago

Yes, that is why OTOY is now using CUDA for their rendering engine, or Unreal Nanite based on compute shaders. Metal is based on C++14, CUDA nowadays can use most of C++20, and HLSL is going into becoming more C++ with HLSL 202x. Not sure about current state of NVN and PSSL. Regarding waiting for features, it depends, it is already so that many graphics techniques can be fully done with shaders, when that isn't the case is because some primitive is missing, which will mean that there will be always the case that you need to wait for such primitives to be made available.

animal531 2y ago
I'm working on an indie game that's a bit like They are Billions with a ton of enemies that need to move together nicely, find targets etc. So I've been going down quite a rabbit-hole of nearest neighbour and spatial partitioning algorithms. I started with CPU multi threading first and then went to full GPU algorithms. While the speed can be really great they suffer from too much parallelism and lack of recursion/communication etc. I still want to try CUDA/OpenCL versions as part of the test.
CooCooCaCha 2y ago
> there will be always the case that you need to wait for such primitives to be made available. About the features thing, when it comes to CPUs you don't really need to wait for features unless it's something like SIMD support but otherwise the programming model is general enough that I don't need to think about CPU features too much. What I'm wondering is, as GPUs become more general, will the situation become more like CPUs. For example, I saw an example where someone wrote a shader, using work graphs, to rasterize triangles. Once you can do things like that, it seems like the need for new primitives is far less.