Wow! Microsoft DirectX Adopting SPIR-V Moving Forward

[slagiewka]

Is this connected to https://devblogs.microsoft.com/direc...lidator-hash/?

[Meteorhead]

Interesting. I read it differently though. They are positioning against Vulkan as an universal API for all devices compared to DX12 (wanting to keep DX12 to be the main API to develop against, which it currently still is - for reasons I do not understand), and an easier translation for shaders is nothing which hurts. Good for us gamers who play DX12 titles though.

MS needs DX12 to always stay one step ahead of Vulkan. Work graphs? DirectML? These things have existed for a fair time, but their Vulkan equivalents are still nowhere to be seen.

MSFT simply made the same mistake Khronos made with SPIR. SPIR was based on LLVM IR 3.4 making it increasingly harder to produce it from newer front-ends, hence came SPIR-V, which was independent of LLVM. DXIL is LLVM IR 3.7 and suffered the same fate.

This news is good not just for Proton and the likes, but purely for Vulkan, OpenCL and SYCL as well, as MSFT will be contributing to the SPIR-V ecosystem, improving it for all APIs that consume it.

[Espionage724]

Embrace phase. Wait a few years for M$ specific SPIR-V extensions that'll have to be reverse engineered.

Ah there it is, I thought I had enough time to ask if someone had a downside to this yet

[lu_tze]

you clearly don't understand how vulkan extensions work

He is talking about SPIR-V, not Vulkan, though.

[Quackdoc]

can't wait to play with it using rust-gpu

[Errinwright]

Meanwhile Khronos is trying to adopt Slang as the default

[mirmirmir]

Rise up Linux gamers, shitty (kernel mode) anti cheat is over. thanks crowdstrike 🤓👍

[stormcrow]

Nice.

so between this and MS eliminating kernel access, Linux gaming will become even better.

I've got a bit of bottom land to sell you Arizona. Prime farming country. (Hint: MS isn't going to kick people out of the kernel. The news is mostly PR fluff and obviously some people are falling for it. They SHOULD, but that's not going to happen any more than the Linux kernel devs will block the ability for anyone to create their own kernel modules.)

[Daktyl198]

At this point the next versions of vulkan and direct 3d might as well be merged into a single api

Would never work. Khronos's model for APIs is inherently not compatible with Microsoft's. Microsoft is all about developer experience, while Khronos is all about features. It's why nobody used OpenGL and drivers for it were extremely hard to write, because it had about 2000 extensions to the core language, on top of 25 versions of the language itself. Vulkan is set to work the same way.

Direct3D has multiple subversions per version, but overall the changes for each version are much more minimal, and better documented. This leads to more stable and easier to write drivers for manufacturers, and easier to read and easier to implement APIs for developers. It's why, even though OpenGL ran on every single platform last generation other than consoles, nobody used it.

[GraysonPeddie]

Am I the only one who is getting the sense of embrace, extend, and extinguish? Sure, Microsoft claimed they love Linux, but not for the desktop. Only the servers. Given the security snafu with Windows Recall and not being able to remove that feature, I do feel that Microsoft will be up to their old tricks in order to get us Linux gamers back into Windows which I do not want.

Although irrelevant, I'm glad to be out of Samba Active Directory Domain Controller and I am now using Cockpit with a 389 Directory Server plugin. It's more advanced compared to Active Directory (although LDAP and Active Directory are not the same), but the fact that I can organize users and groups into organization units (folders) from the web interface is awesome. No more Remote Server Administration Tools in Windows. That Windows VM will be gone for good! And besides, I'm sick and tired of Microsoft having far too much control over Windows. Who wants their wallpapers showing Bing pictures using Windows Spotlight anyway...? I don't.