Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by barchar 252 days ago
No, it is overly complex for modern hardware (unless you use shader objects). Vulkan forces you to statically specify a ton of state that's actually dynamic on modern GPUs. You could cut things down a ton with a new API. Ofc you'd have to require a certain level of hardware support, but imo that will become natural going forward.

Actually, it would be kinda neat to see an API that's fully designed assuming a coherent, cached, shared memory space between device and host. Metal I guess is closest.
2 comments
bsder 252 days ago
> Vulkan forces you to statically specify a ton of state that's actually dynamic on modern GPUs.

Desktop GPUs. Tiling GPUs are still in use on mobile and you can't use the tiling hardware effectively without baking the description into pipelines.

> You could cut things down a ton with a new API.

VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering is what you are looking for

> Actually, it would be kinda neat to see an API that's fully designed assuming a coherent, cached, shared memory space between device and host.

You can just ask for exactly that--even on Vulkan. If you don't want to support computer systems that don't support RBAR, you can do that.

link
jplusequalt 250 days ago
>Ofc you'd have to require a certain level of hardware support

Have you used Vulkan? Specifying required hardware support for your physical device is literally one of the first thing you do when setting up Vulkan.

link