Khronos Group Announces Vulkan, OpenCL 2.1, SPIR-V

[Geri]

I don't really feel like writing a whole argument, we're not getting anywhere.

yeah, there is no real synthesis of the argument, the continuity of our dialoge canot be ensured any more. it still was an interesting conversation.

Not surprising, I think most company websites with a comment section probably do that.

once in a community, one of my works started to get very negative responses. actually, the crew started to become angry more and more, first i not really cared, i debated a bit about that feature, but they very agressively demanded that feature (i still dont understand, why). after a week the topic reached 10-15 page long, with full of hatered, so the whole thing is became like an agressive hate speech against my work.

actually, that feature - it seemed to be a very small thing - but actually needed to completly rewrite very deep parts of the whole code to have it working.

i tryed to avoid to implement it with all of my will, i had to fight myself to even start implementing it. it was like a shock, when i realized that i must implement it. i feelt like an unicorn, and people was shitting tons of buckets in my magic garden, recoloring my sould to dark blue and rotating a knife in my heart.

i had to got myself together, and by almost daily 16 hours of work for almost 8-10 days, i implemented immediately the missing feature that they wanted. i had no other way to step forward in this situation., i ,,had to eat my hat'', there was no other chance. after i implemented, i immediately released it, and sleeped like a day. so two days later i checked the comments, they immediately shutted up. instead, some of them gratulated for implementing it, and some among them actually buyd the thing.

so whats the conclusion? if i had not implemented that feature back then, i would have lost a significant amout of money. a true programmer - and this is true for every other profession too - always listens to the REAL community, and always folows the demands of the community. only cowards deleting comments, for example, people who just want to shit from other people's work with big ego, without serving they demands properly. there is no tomorow for such corporations like imgtec. corporations like that are the shame of capitalism.

[UraniumDeer]

almost all users of steam is a hardcore gamer. this makes this to be an insignificant statistical fact.



this is like telling that Estonia is a black and asian contry, becouse there is 500-1000 black, and 2500 asian, or so...

actually i would say above 50,000 game, as i alreday mentioned, that it is a serious number. these numbers are just nothing.



how vulkan will change on this? with that, you will have to port on vulkan api too. making it in vulkan still makes much less sense than originally making it to be prepared for opengles porting.


me too assume that vulkan is mostly for high demanding softwares and games, and i seriously dubt that this is a viable conception for a graphics api.



steam users are mostly AAA gamers. of course, they need a decent graphics card, to play crysis 42. today if you buy a computer, you will find a directx11 compatible graphics card in it. as you say, these are facts. the problem is that if somebody got a computer 10 years ago, he is not necessary changing it, becouse maybe he does not even need a more powerfull computer. maybe currently there is a 10-20% of vulkan capable graphics chips on the market in total. thats too few. not speaking that there is no drivers for vulkan yet at all. maybe another 10 year, and we reach that 70-80% of users have a vulkan capable graphics chips. assuming that these chips are also dx11 and opengl3 (es?wtf, you quoted a desktop statistics), but still, you can see, that opengl3 and dx11 games are basically nowhere, just precisely on this small segment called aaa gaming. these apis are unable to walk out from this segments, limitated into this very tiny market segment that probably produces 1-2 percent, or even less of the total gaming industry.



and if you want these magic apis from narnia, you still can use directx11, opengl 3/4, opencl, and the other theocretical worldbeater apis, its not need for n+1 world saver solution for this.


of course it needs them, the question is, that it also needs the vulkan-named graphical solution, and the answer is probably negative.


well, i bet that your own rendering code would be much readable, or maybe even faster and more stable than randomly copypasting or inventing a randomly failing shadercrap code to shine the fur on a heroine's leg.

of course its only your decide how you code, i dont want to persuade you from anything, but if i would be you, i would avoid to do even a a line of for vulkan.




i told that there is ~half million game that needs some versions of opengl. vulcano and mantle is nothing compared to that. you replyed -by trying to collude it with previous, different insigths- that there is the opengl es2 with programmable-only-pipeline.

yeah. and?

they are using on mobiles in notable numbers, nobody told it in different ways. still, the fixed-pipeline is much more popular. i seen some statistics on android, from years before, that calimed that the numbers of opengles1 game seriously outperforms the opengles2 games by 8:1. maybe this is not a trustable source, and i dont have it any more, maybe its significantly changed now, but as we seen on PC, where the primitive opengl applications very brutally outnumber the ,,modern'' opengl solutions, this can be simply believed even when now the number of es2 games are significantly incrased. (also almost all opengles2 applications just displaying textured planes, thats what tutorial the developer found, and thats all folks, modern programmable api, here we come.)


so they hating the glBlablablaUniform54245f(bla,bla,bla,bla,bla,bla,b la,&bla,&bla,bla,GL_BLA,GL_BLA,GL_SHIT,GL_CRAP,GL_ GARBAGE,);, but they will not hate the vkBlablablaUniform54245f(bla,bla,bla,bla,bla,bla,b la,&bla,&bla,bla,VK_BLA,VK_BLA,VK_SHIT,VK_CRAP,VK_ GARBAGE); for some magical reason? the two api is crap for the same resons, for the same design flaws.


those tiny mobile apps are actually much more significant than the pc (or maybe nowdays even the console) AAA games. both by money, both by numbers, both by user base.
back then 15 years ago,the pc aaa was like the 40-50% of the total gaming market. in 2009, it was just around 8%. Nowdays, its probably 1-2%. The mobile and the casual cathegory harvested everything. And there basically there is no need for Vulkan in every ways.


you can keep your code in opengl to be extremely simply and minimalistic, if thats your goal. you dont need a new api for just this purpose.


the problem is that the industry nowdays are ganging up on your 10.000 zelda clone. those are the significant both by revenue, both by numbers, both by popularity. and if they just using a 100 line long rendering engine alltogether in opengl, to display textured images, or even 3d polygons, then this is the mass-demand.

okay, that you calim that vulkan is for aaa games. (it is even totally unviable elsewhere at the moment.) there it can get maybe into maybe 10-100 title within this years. but just for that tiny number of games - even if its aaa - it is worth to maintain a new api? opengl is a mass-api, it covers the whole visualisation, thats why it reached its current popularity. i dont see such changes for vulkan. they will produce that few aaa titles, and thats all. vulkan will become obsolote too within 1-2 years, like everything else, and then it would be just nothing more than an obsolote api that used by a few aaa games that nobody remembers any more. there is no future for such apis.



okay, well, vulkan is officially not even exist yet, we are discussing based on about leaked NDA-ed documents, specifications, and sdk snippets, and puzzling the things together with our own mind. (and mantle was not even public. )



i even attempted to run some. for example, 1.5 year ago, there was a gamedev competition, with 10 game, 3 used unity. all 3 crashed my computer (not only the application crashed, the computer had to be rebooted, mouse and numlock freezed, etc). (radeon 4200 + Athlon2 x4 3,3 ghz)
i also tried to run unity games on mobile, downloaded from google play. none of them worked properly, they stuttered too much (2-3 fps), they crashed at loading, or it had design flaws, so advertises filled the screen and i was not able to click on the play button even. (sony xperia mini pro, snapdragon cpu 1 ghz, 512 mbyte ram, adreno205)

so thats how unity and other miracle-engines ,,work'' nowdays
and thats, what most of AAA titles doing on a non-aaa gamer computer, resulting rapid uninstall, and keeping the person in the real gaming industry.

and by real, i mean not the shaderaddict #45245 fps-type games, instead, the simply, real and innovative games.

i never attempted to run unreal engine-based game, becouse i dont care, so i cant tell anything about that, however, i seen it in videos.



no. i actually pressed a shift-delete on my game directory in 2005, when i realized, how boring these games are.
from that point of date, both as an user and as a programmer, if we are talking about gaming, i only interested in subcultural casual gaming, and i broke almost every connection with the AAA.

and yeah, most aaa studio is bankrupted, at least in my contry ALL of them is bankrupted. they made crap aniways. except some smart ones that scaled back to the casual market, recognizing that the #45245 fps clone is boring.


reminds me of the swan song of s3 metal



dont worry, i see it :P


well, yeah, then i officially annouce the world's first black hole generator in my garden, the presentation will be in in 2415 march 5. however, the specification is kept in so secret that i will sign nda with everybody who is interested in it, and i will remove every comments from my blog that calims that this solution is not working, becouse i can do it. Be reasonable. Vulcano, the next generation of graphics apis, fuck yeah.


they alreday ported plenty of games on your so-broken opengl api. whats the difference? money talks, dog barks. once they get the money for porting it, they will probably place it in the recycle bin.




for example, there. i also talked about comments, not from blog posts.

AND yeah, this is one of the blogs where they removed comments. i personally can confirm this.




intel makes good cpus - but they didnt made any notable propaganda for this api, even if they told that they might be writing drivers for them.

but the most lout propagandists are the responsible for this api, for example, imgtec. they are into selling gpu IP-s, they made a crap weakling mips cpu-platform for theyself. now they are shitting they pants, becouse there is no interest on it. i dont think they have huge future.




some of them actually having real time ray tracing. and i still run it on cpu, becouse it was better decide to avoid the crap drivers of the graphics chips, and seriously short the development time (months) by not wasting the time on googlins esoteric gpgpu dream-bullshit, and just purely implementing it on cpu. it looks very very ugly, and has small resolution, eats lot ram, etc, however, my previous opengl game engine was ugly too, eated a lot of ram, while offering MUCH less compatibility even if was written it to be able to scale back from opengl 2.1 to 1.0.


correct



this only means that i see much further than gaming.

You keep making the point that Vulkan is a useless API because most computers worldwide won't support it. Both my desktop and my laptop are OpenGL 3.3+ compatible. Actually, I don't know anyone that has a computer that isn't (not even the PC's my parents are using). I know that these facts doesn't translate into something tangible, but let me ask you this:
Does the fact that a lot of people can't afford hardware with new and greater abilities, mean that we should never ever advance past OpenGL 1.1, or DX9?
Sometimes you have to drive technology forward. In this case, Vulkan could be used as a platform for greater and easier cross- and backwards-compatibility in the future. Throw all OpenGL versions on top of Vulkan, using an Open Source OpenGL implementation - and all games using that, should act the same across the different OS's and hardware. If that's not a win for games using OpenGL - I don't know what is.
Compatibility is then something created by a lot of people, including vendors, ensuring quick adaption of new OpenGL versions, tweaks from random geniuses, and access to the code on the developer side, enabling the possibility to better predict how engines reacts.
Further; sometimes gaming on a laptop - I'd love to be able to squeeze more performance out of the somewhat limited capacity, that a lightweight gaming laptop offers.

All that said, AAA games are the ones that will be using Vulkan (a point made many times in this thread), making the fact that a lot of steam users are hardcore gamers, a very significant statistical fact. Usually AAA games are quite a lot more expensive than a new game that is still only using OpenGL < 3, or DX9. So you might not sell as many AAA games, but price of the game, still makes a very significant market.
Then you have professional gaming. Do you really think that companies developing fast paced engines used for professional competitive gaming, wouldn't want to squeeze out every single frame they possibly could, to be able to sell more licenses for their engine?
If AAA games/competitive gaming had been negligible, then there would have been no such thing as eSports.

[Geri]

UraniumDeer: lets make the things clear.

i didnt told anybody, what api he should use in his software, i didnt decided, who should buy what, i didnt decided, what computer people should buy or not buy, or what from these must support or not. (or at least i hope so.)

i told, what I did, do, and will do according to this. i dont really care, how people are making they programs, its they business, they responsibility.

there is the market, where users want to buy, developers want to sell. its not significant, what one piece, person, corporation wants. the question is, what the mass want.

its not about ,,people not want to upgrade computers, so we are forced to use directx9 as a developer''. no. there is the people with some computer - they decide, what computer they own (usually some pentium4 or core2duo), they decide, what games they buy, and on the other side, there is the developers, they also decide, what and how they want to write, they usually will not care about magic unicorn-apis, they just write some very short and compatible code. and the hardware vendors decide, what devices they release, which is usually some low-power cheap mass-device.

and these factors are standing into some kind of balance points.

thats how capitalism, and basically, our universe works.

we have opengl1 since almost 20 years by now. directx9 is 13 year old.
a random users generic pentium4 laptop is also ~14 year old.

this is not obscurantism, this is market.

what you want to do against this? you make a law that its illegal to write any software that starts on these computers, or make it illegal to write software on this apis?

it does not matters, what you or me want. if its about business, where only the reality matters. there is no place for wishful thinking here. and game programming is about business. using apis that not enough compatible is an economic suicide.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

I don't really feel like writing a whole argument, we're not getting anywhere. Part of the post is even a statement of personal taste or are experiences I can't say anything about. We've also gone completely offtopic. We were talking whether Vulcan will fall into obscurity or not.

And I think this is where the mismatch in our argument lies:

Of course. And Vulkan will certainly not be used in casual games anytime soon.

Will that make Vulkan fall into obscurity? Even the "small" amount of DX11 games didn't hinder development or use of that API, did it?




Ahh, you mean they are removing very negative comments? Not surprising, I think most company websites with a comment section probably do that.


I don't know what you view as "propaganda", but this might be something like it. They even expressed interest in Mantle.


Not sure what this even means, but Vulkan is an API for demanding 3d applications. A big chunk of that will be "hardcore" games (for which there certainly a market exists).
There's also Pixar in the sponsor list, tough. Seems Vulkan will be used in other sectors too.

To be clear there are 300 million iOS users, 120+ million OS X users and all have OpenGL integrated into their platforms.

PIXAR/LucasFilm/ILM, etc means Disney, which means all the motion picture studios and applications using OpenGL, OpenCL and more throughout their workflows.
Adobe, SONY, Google, Autodesk, Dassault Systems, ANSYS, Comsol, and literally hundreds of other heavy weight apps requiring a forward view of OpenGL's future are heavily vested in seeing it through.

The names listed on the Vulcan API are just direct outfits helping develop the spec, including every major CPU, GPGPU vendors, and only 1 major operating system vendor not listed: Microsoft. Apple being involved guarantees a huge swath of users will be benefited from Vulcan.

As more and more of Microsoft's market share erodes [as is happening] the less interest in DirectX will ensue.

Anyone debating you whether this being big news has a hard on for picking a fight, for the sole purpose of having something to do.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

UraniumDeer: lets make the things clear.

i didnt told anybody, what api he should use in his software, i didnt decided, who should buy what, i didnt decided, what computer people should buy or not buy, or what from these must support or not. (or at least i hope so.)

i told, what I did, do, and will do according to this. i dont really care, how people are making they programs, its they business, they responsibility.

there is the market, where users want to buy, developers want to sell. its not significant, what one piece, person, corporation wants. the question is, what the mass want.

its not about ,,people not want to upgrade computers, so we are forced to use directx9 as a developer''. no. there is the people with some computer - they decide, what computer they own (usually some pentium4 or core2duo), they decide, what games they buy, and on the other side, there is the developers, they also decide, what and how they want to write, they usually will not care about magic unicorn-apis, they just write some very short and compatible code. and the hardware vendors decide, what devices they release, which is usually some low-power cheap mass-device.

and these factors are standing into some kind of balance points.

thats how capitalism, and basically, our universe works.

we have opengl1 since almost 20 years by now. directx9 is 13 year old.
a random users generic pentium4 laptop is also ~14 year old.

this is not obscurantism, this is market.

what you want to do against this? you make a law that its illegal to write any software that starts on these computers, or make it illegal to write software on this apis?

it does not matters, what you or me want. if its about business, where only the reality matters. there is no place for wishful thinking here. and game programming is about business. using apis that not enough compatible is an economic suicide.

Who in the hell do you know that is hording Pentium 4 systems or working with 10+ year old GPGPUs? The US routinely adds nearly 100 million desktops/laptops/workstations per year in lieu of new models.

They aren't buying Pentium 4s or Nvidia 3.3 or older compliant GPUs.

[Geri]

Marc Driftmeyer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_research

[smitty3268]

Is SPIR-V like some kind of shared, cross-platform binary BLOB interface?

It's essentially a virtual machine assembly language. Think java bytecode or .net MSIL. The driver will be able to read it in and easily generate actual hardware specific instructions from it because it's sort of a generic 1-size-fits-all assembly language - if your driver doesn't have a specific instruction, or optimizes things a certain way, it should be relatively easy to do hardware specific transforms on it.

You can also think of it like TGSI in gallium, as it has mostly the same role.

How likely can it be used to take total control over the computer?

Pretty unlikely. It's meant to just be shader code running on your GPU, and i think most modern hardware takes steps to make sure each app gets it's own memory space - but particularly on older and mobile parts, i suppose something could be possible. I don't think that's any different from the current situation with OpenGL.

[geearf]

In one word, yes.

Now, the question becomes, "Will they?"

Currently, they translate DirectX to OpenGL, which, depending on the game, is about half as fast as native. Presumably, they can start by using their existing HLSL transpiler, and at the start of the game, simply transform that to SPIR-V.

This would require they rewrite the OpenGL specific portions as their Vulkan equivalent. They may not be willing to do that, especially so soon. Remember, they are against supporting the DirectX 9 state tracker, due to its low number of affected users. However, if every vendor really does support this, they lose some of the reasons not to support it.

If an OpenGL implementation is made on top of Vulcan, then they could have a free lunch. Keep in mind, however, that we already hve something similar to this system in place, gallium3d, so in this scenario, we should see very little speed increase. One benefit it would have, however, is every GPU manufacturer would presumably put their resources behind a common implementation to optimize the SPIR-V compiler portion.

Thank you for your answer!

[BeardedGNUFreak]

LOL!

And dimwits are still babbling back and forth about this dead on arrival turd Kronos just dropped.

Threads like this one are going to be as hilarious to read a year from now as it is now reading the proclamations from rambling retards about AMD's POS Mantle posted a year ago.

Hopefully this lame Vulcan sideshow dies quickly and doesn't damage the actual development of OpenGL.

[smitty3268]

LOL!

And dimwits are still babbling back and forth about this dead on arrival turd Kronos just dropped.

Threads like this one are going to be as hilarious to read a year from now as it is now reading the proclamations from rambling retards about AMD's POS Mantle posted a year ago.

Hopefully this lame Vulcan sideshow dies quickly and doesn't damage the actual development of OpenGL.

I get it, your whole account is just to troll people. But can you at least show a little humor or originality? This is just lame.