Originally posted by ElectricPrism
View Post
Announcement
Collapse
No announcement yet.
Microsoft Open-Sources DirectX Shader Compiler
Collapse
X
-
-
Originally posted by DeepDayze View PostThis 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.
- Likes 1
Comment
-
Originally posted by ElectricPrism View PostWhat'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.
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...
- Likes 1
Comment
-
Originally posted by ElectricPrism View PostWhat'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.
Comment
-
Originally posted by L_A_G View PostMy guess would be to restart the now abandoned effort to create a HLSL compiler for Vulkan.
- Likes 2
Comment
-
Originally posted by shmerl View PostIt's nowhere abandoned. It's been work in progress for a while already. See https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glslang/issues/362
Comment
-
Originally posted by ElectricPrism View PostWhat'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.
- Likes 1
Comment
-
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.
- Likes 2
Comment
Comment