News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by shrewduser on Sunday November 13, 2016 @10:34PM (#12947337)
i wasn't even aware vulkan obviated openCL...
Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by rubber_duck on Monday November 14, 2016 @04:18AM (#12948530)
SPIR-V is the intermediate language Vulkan uses for shaders, it's also the intermediate language of OpenCL - so if you implement SPIR-V for Vulkan you also get that for OpenCL - so now even if a company doesn't care about optimizing OpenCL it gets stuff from Vulkan for free
Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by shmerl on Sunday November 13, 2016 @11:24PM (#12947553)
They overlap to some degree. Vulkan allows access to compute queues of the GPU (in addition to graphics ones).
Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by pjmlp on Monday November 14, 2016 @01:47AM (#12947971)
OpenGL already does that via compute shaders and it hasn't helped.
Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by shmerl on Monday November 14, 2016 @01:51AM (#12947983)
Hasn't helped what exactly? OpenGL can't provide proper parallelized access to all the queues, so having compute shaders there isn't that useful.
Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by pjmlp on Monday November 14, 2016 @02:22AM (#12948080)
To gain adoption.

NVidia doesn't care about OpenCL.

Google doesn't care, and pushes Renderscript instead.

Apple doesn't care, it created OpenCL, but since Khronos doesn't dance their music, they rather push Metal Compute Shaders.

Microsoft has C++AMP and DX Compute.

Additionally CUDA was designed to be targeted by multiple languages, while OpenCL had to wait for OpenCL 2.0 for it to happen.

Also the graphical debuggers for OpenCL could get some love.

I know which GPU makers I will keep giving my money to.

Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by shmerl on Monday November 14, 2016 @02:29AM (#12948105)
When crooked interests hinder adoption, you should blame the crooked interests, not the technology.

Anyway, Vulkan provides lower level access to the compute functionality. And MS and Apple can get lost with their selfish NIH approach. The rest are supporting Vulkan, including all GPU makers.

Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by pjmlp on Monday November 14, 2016 @03:49AM (#12948418)
What rest?

So far I have only seen Vulkan on GNU/Linux and Android 7.0+ deployments.

And I am willing to bet it won't change, specially since most of us only care about middleware engines nowadays.

Guess which API was being discussed at Unite 2016 LA? Hint: it wasn't Vulkan.

Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by erichocean on Monday November 14, 2016 @03:59PM (#12953310)
> So far I have only seen Vulkan on GNU/Linux and Android 7.0+ deployments.

Vulkan is widely available on Windows, not sure how you missed that.

You can also use the Vulkan API today on iOS and OS X via a third-party library that translates between the Vulkan APIs and Metal, called MoltenVK.[0]

MoltenVK is not complete, but it covers the majority of the functionality (including SPIR-V shader ingestion) and I don't see any technical roadblocks to most of the remaining work.

[0] https://moltengl.com/moltenvk/

Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by pjmlp on Monday November 14, 2016 @05:26PM (#12953926)
> Vulkan is widely available on Windows, not sure how you missed that.

I have not missed, just haven't seen too many caring about it on the Windows game development forums.

> You can also use the Vulkan API today on iOS and OS X via a third-party library that translates between the Vulkan APIs and Metal, called MoltenVK.[0]

Zero advantages versus middleware engines.

Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by shmerl on Monday November 14, 2016 @05:41PM (#12954031)
> I have not missed, just haven't seen too many caring about it on the Windows game development forums.

I guess you visit wrong forums. All major engine developers are busy with it.

Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by pjmlp on Tuesday November 15, 2016 @02:06AM (#12956196)
No, you are the one still not getting how the game industry works.

Those game engines support the graphics APIs from, PS3, PS4, PSP, PSP Vita, Wii, 3DS, OpenGL, DX9, DX10, DX11, DX12, WebGL, Metal, Vulkan.

Adding support for Vulkan is just yet another bullet point on that list, just like they are busy adding Metal support, as it was discussed at Unite LA.

The people that actually use those engines to make games, don't care what APIs are abstracted by those engines, as long as, their game is fast, takes full advantage of the GPU and targets the game system they want to sell to.

Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by shmerl on Tuesday November 15, 2016 @02:11PM (#12961179)
No, you don't get it, since adding anything to the list increases costs and slows down development. But I guess since you aren't working on those engines, you just assume magically adding a bullet point is all it takes.
Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by gcp on Monday November 14, 2016 @10:55AM (#12950585)
Guess which API was being discussed at Unite 2016 LA?

OpenGL ES?

(also with compute shaders in the latest version...)

Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by pjmlp on Monday November 14, 2016 @01:56PM (#12952265)
Metal support.
Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by shmerl on Monday November 14, 2016 @02:09PM (#12952383)
Metal is useless outside of Apple, so it's DOA adoption wise. Developers will be of course forced to use it when targeting Apple. Adoption however means wide coverage of multiple platforms.
Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by pjmlp on Monday November 14, 2016 @05:29PM (#12953945)
Middleware engines have won the hearts of game developers, it doesn't matter what runs underneath, only for those that do API religion.
Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by shmerl on Monday November 14, 2016 @05:43PM (#12954041)
> it doesn't matter what runs underneath

You keep repeating it, but it's nonsense, because it always matters how hard is for the engine to target multiple platforms.

Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by pjmlp on Tuesday November 15, 2016 @02:08AM (#12956204)
It is nonsense to you, because all your arguments fail flat when there is an abstraction layer that hides away what actual APIs are being used.

Yet that is what professional game developers care about, not API wars.

Maybe you should attend a GDC event.

Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by shmerl on Tuesday November 15, 2016 @02:13PM (#12961189)
Again, try working on that abstraction layer, and then you'll see what it takes. Claims that it's trivial or it's normal and should be that way have no substance. It's like saying that Web developers enjoy browsers not following standards and the need to address all those quirks is trivial. No normal developer wants that.
Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by gcp on Monday November 14, 2016 @02:43PM (#12952600)
Huh I admit this is really surprising.

I guess the iPhone market won't get Vulkan hence the interest?

Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by erichocean on Monday November 14, 2016 @03:56PM (#12953276)
MoltenVK[0] is a way to use the Vulkan API and shaders on Metal.

MoltenVK doesn't currently support Vulkan compute shaders, I don't see why it couldn't in the future—compute shaders are SPIR-V and actually easier to support than graphics shaders IMO. I suspect they just haven't gotten to it yet.

[0] https://moltengl.com/moltenvk/

Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by shmerl on Monday November 14, 2016 @03:54AM (#12948433)
> What rest?

Everyone.

> And I am willing to bet it won't change

MS and Apple will sleep until they'll realize, their NIH is threatened by competition. They don't play nice otherwise. But you expressed multiple times that you like lock-in, so I doubt you'll appreciate it.

Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by glaze on Monday November 14, 2016 @07:37AM (#12949398)
I don't think the lock-in in the case of graphics APIs is too bad, because even for large codebases implementing a new graphics API support is often done by one or two persons.
Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by pjmlp on Monday November 14, 2016 @04:22AM (#12948548)
You keep forgetting Sony and Nintendo.
Re:Pascal GPUs on All Fronts Push Nvidia to New Highs by wlesieutre on Sunday November 13, 2016 @10:54PM (#12947437)
I don't know a ton about the subject, but there's some coverage of it in this overview: https://www.khronos.org/assets/uploads/developers/library/ov...