Khronos Group Announces Vulkan, OpenCL 2.1, SPIR-V

[dungeon]

I'm pretty sure AMDGPU is the name of the new kernel driver and has nothing to do with LLVM.

https://github.com/llvm-mirror/llvm/tree/master/lib/Target/R600

[glxextxexlg]

Logo changed!

At last they listened to me and changed the logo. Now here is a logo that fits to Vulkan the Barbarian graphics api. See how "low level" and "direct" it is?

[GreatEmerald]

Hmm. So yea, that's Mantle. The name does make sense in light of it: a volcano in an opening to the mantle, so Vulkan is another way to say "OpenMantle".

For me the same reservation as with Mantle stays. With great power to change low-level things comes great opportunities to screw it all up, and unlike drivers, games don't tend to get updated too much. For things like UT4 it won't be much of an issue since it's constantly tracking and rebasing on the main engine repository, but for most games out there, well...

And of course this is only relevant to engines, anything less than that is better served by OpenGL. Anything and the kitchen sink can run OpenGL 1.2, after all.

Though SPIR is an interesting idea, and I wonder if that means languages could make their compilers output such IR directly. Instead of writing GLSL/HLSL/C++SL/whatever, you could write in, say, plain D, and the compiler would generate the needed code itself. Same with OpenCL.

[elect]

So basically we have accepted vendor terms that they can't be arsed to write good high level drivers for us to use.

Engine guys will be in awe because a) job security b) performance without acting like you are using something standartized.

I just love that confidence that now vendors will work together so at least this low level API could be actually usable.

Yeaaaaaaah....it's never gonna happen guys, admit it.

lmao..

Anyway engine devs will just be requested to do more -> more skillz -> more money, I guess they will be happy

[Michael]

I'm pretty sure AMDGPU is the name of the new kernel driver and has nothing to do with LLVM.

The AMD R600 GPU LLVM back-end in LLVM was renamed to AMDGPU. But yes there's also the yet-to-be-published AMDGPU kernel DRM driver.

[gnufreex]

I dunno... the capability to breath fire, a long serpentine neck that gives them reach without having to put themselves in harm's way, and being several orders of magnitude larger... vs a water buffalo... I'm going to bet on the dragon every time even without it being able to fly. :P

Problem is that dragon don't exist and it never existed. So GNU wins.

[mdias]

So basically we have accepted vendor terms that they can't be arsed to write good high level drivers for us to use.

Engine guys will be in awe because a) job security b) performance without acting like you are using something standartized.

I just love that confidence that now vendors will work together so at least this low level API could be actually usable.

Yeaaaaaaah....it's never gonna happen guys, admit it.

lmao..

Anyway engine devs will just be requested to do more -> more skillz -> more money, I guess they will be happy

I can't tell whether you guys are being sarcastic or just talking out of your asses...

Engine developers want this. The developers who use engines already made don't give a f*ck since they won't be exposed to the details anyway... Except maybe for shaders, which will probably not be all that different anyway... Some engines even ship node based material editors which don't require you to write any shaders at all...

[blackout23]

I hope drivers will consume SPIR-V directly rather than relying on SPIR-V -> LLVM-IR/TGSI/NVPTX and introduce variability between vendors this way.

[elect]

I can't tell whether you guys are being sarcastic or just talking out of your asses...

Engine developers want this. The developers who use engines already made don't give a f*ck since they won't be exposed to the details anyway... Except maybe for shaders, which will probably not be all that different anyway... Some engines even ship node based material editors which don't require you to write any shaders at all...

Never said they dont

[johnc]

This all sounds like a dumb idea.

Within 2-3 years it's going to be abandoned and people will be back on OpenGL.

They should have just cleaned up OGL rather than succumbing to the hype.