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There have been significant benefits to having a driver / runtime layer between the application and the GPU. It has enabled a competitive ecosystem of GPU vendo
by mattnewport 12y ago
There have been significant benefits to having a driver / runtime layer between the application and the GPU. It has enabled a competitive ecosystem of GPU vendors and I don't think we would have seen as rapid a pace of innovation and performance improvements if we had had a de facto low level hardware interface proprietary to a particular vendor.
This is not to criticize Vulkan, the trend to lower level APIs like Vulkan, DirectX 12 and Metal is a good one but I don't think the goal should be to eliminate the driver entirely or get rid of any hardware abstraction layer on non console platforms.
- TD-Linux 12y agoHaving open GPU ISA's is not the same as requiring them all to be the same. GCC and LLVM both compile to a variety of architectures but manage to share a lot of code and optimizations between all of the targets. Having the same for GPUs, where the vendor gives you an ISA and you can use whatever compiler you like (even hand written assembly), would be a lot more preferable. This is what the open-source Gallium3D stack does, though it's hindered by relying on reverse-engineered information.