Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by elliottkember 5552 days ago
I'm not a hardware guy, but it's been my understanding that this is why drivers exist. Drivers are a nightmare, though. I don't miss dealing with them.
2 comments
pohl 5552 days ago
Drivers may provide you semantic uniformity over a diverse set of hardware, but I think Sweeny sounds more interested in performance guarantees, which they may not be able to provide, depending both on the hardware and how well the driver has been optimized.
link
geon 5552 days ago
> this is why drivers exist

Having a uniform interface for all hardware is great, but doesn't solve the specific problem here.

There are so many variables that affects performance. Some of them are:

* Graphics card fillrate

* Graphics card memory size

* Graphics card buss speed

* CPU speed

* CPU cache size

* RAM Size

* RAM speed

* Optical disk speed

* Harddrive speed

* Harddrive cache size

You need to make tradeoffs based on how they affect your particular application.

link