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Microsoft Open-Sources DirectX Shader Compiler

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  • #11
    Originally posted by ElectricPrism View Post
    What's their motive? Seriously, they stand to benefit in some way - what motive is behind this I'd like to hear from more experienced readers in the industry.
    I think some just are smart enough, and pushed some open tool out which can help cross platform engines and tools like Wine, despite their management being thick skulled, and not wanting to collaborate with Khronos on Vulkan. I.e. it's probably developers' initiative, and not some official MS move.

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    • #12
      Originally posted by DeepDayze View Post
      This does sound like a trap but it might help with porting games over to Linux, if a complete DirectX compiler can be built for Linux. I for one do question MS's motives for making this move as DX is another of their crown jewels.
      In what way is this a trap? A complete Direct3D shader compiler can already be built for Linux and glslang was already attempting to do this. There's no reason to keep it closed source. They don't benefit from it at all.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by ElectricPrism View Post
        What's their motive? Seriously, they stand to benefit in some way - what motive is behind this I'd like to hear from more experienced readers in the industry.
        I'm not experienced in the industry, but I think I have an idea about the motivation.
        d3d12 is competing with Vulkan. With the latter being all open and platform-independent, they have to offer something. In both, d3d12 and Vulkan, shaders are shipped in intermediate representation (SPIR-V or DXIL), so the frontend compilation is done by the application developer. Those devs might find it useful to have a reference implementation. Also it should help developing and debugging device drivers.


        And yeah, this might help glslang as well as LunarGLASS...

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        • #14
          Originally posted by ElectricPrism View Post
          What's their motive? Seriously, they stand to benefit in some way - what motive is behind this I'd like to hear from more experienced readers in the industry.
          My guess would be to restart the now abandoned effort to create a HLSL compiler for Vulkan. There was a lot of talk about it when Vulkan was initially announced, but I don't think anyone ever got around to start implementing it proper and it pretty much completely fell off the radar months ago.

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          • #15
            Originally posted by L_A_G View Post
            My guess would be to restart the now abandoned effort to create a HLSL compiler for Vulkan.
            It's nowhere abandoned. It's been work in progress for a while already. See https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glslang/issues/362

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            • #16
              To me seems like they just try to keep their technology afloat.
              Vulkan putting pressure here of course.

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              • #17
                Apart from not wanting developers to ditch DirectX for Vulkan, they are also trying to fix the "evil" image steve ballmer portrayed.

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                • #18
                  Originally posted by shmerl View Post
                  It's nowhere abandoned. It's been work in progress for a while already. See https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glslang/issues/362
                  I'll be damned... Looks like I need to start paying better attention to these things.

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                  • #19
                    Originally posted by ElectricPrism View Post
                    What's their motive? Seriously, they stand to benefit in some way - what motive is behind this I'd like to hear from more experienced readers in the industry.
                    A futile attempt at making Microsoft's proprietary stuff still relevant in the modern world and avoiding another extinction along the lines of WMV, WMA, Zune, Windows phone etc. In five years time a vast majority of games will be done using Vulcan with Direct X as an afterthought, their only hope is to fully open source DX but even that may not save it from irrelevancy.

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                    • #20
                      I suspect this is a part of a plan to capture the very very lucrative markets that Microsoft is currently all but shut out of: large-scale rendering and non-graphics use of GPUs.. While Microsoft has an effective monopoly on the billion-dollar home games industry it is a non-participant in fields like cinematic rendering and massively-parallel scientific computing like protein folding and climate forecasting, all of which are dominated by Linux. Those are also the field where the GPU makers make the bulk of their revenue (GPU makers make more money from Linux than from Windows -- your game machine may be important to you, but the markup on consumer toys is tiny for silicon makers and the volume relatively small). Opening the source of the compiler to its proprietary shader language can be a sound part of the strategy to grab a larger share of those markets.

                      I don't see anything nefarious in legitimate competition. I see maybe the side effect of allowing easier game porting to Linux, but the bottleneck there was never shader compiler supprt so I don't think this will make a difference in that respect.

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