Re:Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1
by vbezhenar on Thursday September 29, 2022 @05:47PM
(#33027707)
I don't really understand what's the difference between AAA game and Google Chrome? I thought that modern applications heavily use GPU acceleration. Is it some subset of GPU commands that's required for desktop, compared to AAA game? Is it possible that Google Chrome will crash the OS with some tricky CSS animation (may be in the future version)?
Re:Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1
by coldtea on Thursday September 29, 2022 @05:59PM
(#33027870)
>I don't really understand what's the difference between AAA game and Google Chrome?
Hundreds of GPU features the latter doesn't use in normal hw-accelerated rendering of webpages... except maybe in doing WebGL content (and even less much fewer and older features than what AAA games want)
Right, because WebGL 2.0 is basically 2010 GPU hardware, while the upcoming WebGPU is targeting 2014 hardware.
Re:Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1
by fomine3 on Thursday September 29, 2022 @09:04PM
(#33029536)
Also don't need so much performance so it can be easier
Re:Native Linux GPU Driver for Apple M1
by conradev on Thursday September 29, 2022 @09:06PM
(#33029548)
> Is it some subset of GPU commands that's required for desktop, compared to AAA game?
Yes. Compute shaders and geometry shaders are big features. Vulkan, DX12 and Metal also brought a jump in performance at the API level by allowing developers to batch commands sent to the GPU.
Desktop environments can and do leverage those newer APIs to get marginally better battery life. Asahi will miss out on those benefits, but the performance will be insanely better than “no GPU at all”.
Yes, but WebGPU is basically the version 1.0 of the common subset of those APIs, meaning 2014 hardware.
Also, the Apple GPU has evolved from PowerVR roots dating back to the 1990s. It is fairly safe to assume that the next generation of Apple GPU will share enough with the current generation that in 3 years, supporting whatever new hardware exists will be incremental rather than transformative ground-up work.
This was already the case for M1 into M2.