Wow! Microsoft DirectX Adopting SPIR-V Moving Forward

[Artim]

Dang, this is starting to sound like people not wanting to put in extra effort for unique stuff (DX) and instead all gathering under one thing as a convenience. That's how systemd and Wayland became stars.

They became the only sane option because they vastly improved upon what was there before them. Nobody's stopping you from trying to create alternatives, but for it to be adopted, it not only would have to bring all the benefits of systemd or Wayland, but it had to vastly improve on them for anyone to even bother. And with the latter, that's simply impossible, as everyone that would be capable of doing so is working on Wayland. The "alternatives" are left to a bunch of insane people having not the slightest clue about what they are even doing, not to mention document their stuff in a way that other people can even tell if it's any usable (**cough** Arcan **cough**)

Like, I guess it's cool to be going for an open-source standard, but how long until the main project does something "gross" and causes people to splinter-off into other things/fork?

Has happened before and will continue happening. That's how open source works. Why would that be any issue? That's what just happened with Redis as the latest example, NixOS is also currently being forked. So what? Live goes on. The difference just is, if you have a project everyone is involved in like the Linux Kernel itself or Wayland, the chance of that happening is very low.

[Artim]

If the proprietary license was an issue, then both DXVK and Gallium Nine wouldn't exist. Only code and implementations can be copyrighted, not APIs.

Wrong. DXVK is a translator, not an implementation of D3D. And when it comes to Gallium Nine, just because MS never was interested enough in that piece of garbage doesn't mean it couldn't have nuked it if they wanted to. The fact that they haven't is no proof that legally they could have.

[Artim]

No you missed something.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/12/intel-using-dxvk-part-of-steam-proton-for-their-windows-arc-gpu-dx-9-drivers/

I know this might be kind of surprising but if you go by number of systems in wild Intel is the largest GPU vendor and not by a small margin.

Only if you include iGPUs. But for all I understand, the link you posted is only true for the dGPUs, as they lacked DX9 support. At least it would be news to me that they also did the same for their iGPUs

[quot]What is the point of Microsoft pushing forwards with DXIL when all the GPU vendors/driver makers are going todo is translate to SPIR-V anyhow. I see this recent change is Microsoft kind of seeing the writing on the wall that GPU vendors are not going to spend time doing specialist things in hardware for Microsoft direct x.[/QUOTE]

I don't. Only Intel did for their dGPUs. AMD and Nvidia aren't doing that for all I know.

[oiaohm]

Only if you include iGPUs. But for all I understand, the link you posted is only true for the dGPUs, as they lacked DX9 support. At least it would be news to me that they also did the same for their iGPUs

What is the point of Microsoft pushing forwards with DXIL when all the GPU vendors/driver makers are going todo is translate to SPIR-V anyhow. I see this recent change is Microsoft kind of seeing the writing on the wall that GPU vendors are not going to spend time doing specialist things in hardware for Microsoft direct x.

I don't. Only Intel did for their dGPUs. AMD and Nvidia aren't doing that for all I know.

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/bringing-hlsl-ray-tracing-to-vulkan/

Artim Nvidia had not done to their driver yet but had been playing around for quite some time taking the HLSL in and generating SPIR-V instead skipping the DXIL.

Intel action is more writing on the wall.

Also there is something on the AMD side that is very interesting.

A developer working on vkd3d-proton found a few things.

https://themaister.net/blog/2022/08/21/my-personal-hell-of-translating-dxil-to-spir-v-finale/

He did quite a series on translating DXIL to Spir-v.

https://themaister.net/blog/2022/04/11/my-personal-hell-of-translating-dxil-to-spir-v-part-4/

In part 4 finds out that limitations of spir-v happen to line up with GPU vendor ISA limitations. But microsoft implementation of DXIL does not line up with GPU vendor ISA limitations. Yes Microsoft implemented features in DXIL that no GPU vendor has implemented in their ISA yet game developers have proceed to use them... Some of the cause of DX12 games using more cpu than they really should and some games performance issues.

GPU vendors have not been adding Microsoft ideas for GPU ISA extensions/features for quite some time. GPU vendors have been added their ideas for GPU ISA extensions/features to Spir-v.

The more you know about this topic between Intel just straight up lining up to jump ship then add in AMD and Nvidia not added features Microsoft DX developers thought was a good idea to their GPU ISA even when it causes them to do badly in particular game benchmarks.

Reality it just has not made sense for Microsoft not to accept Spir-v because pushing DXIL was not causing GPU vendors to alter there ISA to suite. Also accepting Spir-v will make wsl graphical simpler to implement no more having to do Linux side spir-v to dxil to send to windows.

[Quackdoc]

Yes, it seems the cross-platform games just use some abstraction and must specifically support each API.

yeah typically most of the support is in the engine, and then devs do final tuning, at least GLES is portable to most things thanks to the homebrew community, and games with lesser needs would be able to use them easily enough. It is ashame it is taking xbox so long to support support vk. playstation seems to just not care at all.

[Daktyl198]

Wrong. DXVK is a translator, not an implementation of D3D. And when it comes to Gallium Nine, just because MS never was interested enough in that piece of garbage doesn't mean it couldn't have nuked it if they wanted to. The fact that they haven't is no proof that legally they could have.

1. A translation layer/library is still an implementation of an API. At what layer does it suddenly not become an implementation? OpenGL was layered on top of Gallium, does that mean that the Linux OpenGL drivers aren't implementations? Gallium is layered on top of the kernel APIs, does that mean it's not an implementation?

2. Gallium Nine, released almost a decade ago, is still better than DXVK in both stability and performance for DX9 titles.

[Artim]

1. A translation layer/library is still an implementation of an API. At what layer does it suddenly not become an implementation? OpenGL was layered on top of Gallium, does that mean that the Linux OpenGL drivers aren't implementations? Gallium is layered on top of the kernel APIs, does that mean it's not an implementation?

It becomes an implementation when it actually is an implementation, not a translation. Gallium is merely an API that's used to implement e.g OpenGL. So no, OpenGL isn't "layered on top" of Gallium. You may draw it in a diagram that way, but it's something fundamentally different.

2. Gallium Nine, released almost a decade ago, is still better than DXVK in both stability and performance for DX9 titles.

Sure, that must be the reason why it just has been abandoned...

[LtdJorge]

Meanwhile Khronos is trying to adopt Slang as the default

Slang is to HLSL what SPIR-V is to DXIL. Not comparable.

[starbg]

My assumption is, that the long-term goal of MS is to migrate to Linux, because Windows is a maintenance burden and their cash cow nowadays is Office, Cloud and services in general.

Windows is the only killer product for Microsoft, and anyone can do cloud services.
1. Almost all peripherals and end consumer software regard Windows as the primary support platform, because its developer resources are stable and clear.
2. Windows is still the weather gane of the x86 platform. Most of the computer debugging ACPI, UEFI, SMBIOS, etc. in the desktop field is based on Windows and aims to meet the Windows standard.
3. Therefore, Microsoft maintains its industry position by continuously updating Windows.
4. Finally, Microsoft can't control the development of x86, but also completely controls its ecology.

[skierpage]

Who the fuck gives a damn about marketing bs, when you can just cite actual numbers. Like these: https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-ma...-201208-202408
The numbers from statcounter say the same: https://www.statista.com/statistics/...ems-worldwide/
The only statistics I could find saying something different where these: https://www.counterpointresearch.com...from-nintendo/

Weird. Maybe those are cumulative market share numbers? Numerous sites reported PS5 outselling Xbox X/S 3 to 1 in 2023 and so far in 2024.