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Yes. Apple have their own graphics API. They were able to decide that, say, geometry shaders aren't worth the chip area or engineering effort to support. Other
by ferbivore 2y ago
Yes. Apple have their own graphics API. They were able to decide that, say, geometry shaders aren't worth the chip area or engineering effort to support. Other IHVs don't get that choice; for geometry shaders, for instance, they're part of both Vulkan and OpenGLES, there are games and benchmarks that use them, and customers (end-users, gamedevs, review/benchmark sites, SoC vendors) will evaluate GPUs based, in some small part, on how good their geometry shader support is. Same story for tessellation, transform feedback, and whatever else Apple dropped.
- fingerlocks 2y agoI don’t think it’s accurate to say Apple “dropped” these features. Tessellation is done with general purpose compute shaders. You can do the same with “geometry shaders” if the need arises as well
- dagmx 2y agoOther hardware vendors absolutely do the same. Geometry shaders are poor performers on several other vendors for precisely the same reason
- ferbivore 2y agoAt 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.
- dagmx 2y agoSome do, but a lot will have their firmware actually do the translation into other compute types that align better with the hardware.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rstat1 2y ago>>(end-users, gamedevs, review/benchmark sites, SoC vendors) will evaluate GPUs based, in some small part, on how good their geometry shader support is Do they? I can't remember ever seeing any mention of Geometry Shader performance in a GPU review I've read/watched. The one thing I've ever heard about it was about how bad they were.
- lewispollard 2y agoYeah, geometry shaders aren't even widely used, they weren't great in the first place and devs have moved on.