Unigine Needs Your Help Testing Out Their New Hardware Detection

[jaxxed]

if this is related at all to their vulkan efforts, then hardware detection are meant to be a critical part. Games are meant to decide which graphics card to use, and which cards can be used for off-loading. Optimizations for recognized cards could be about optimized settings (disable 32x ani on AMD) as well as hardware specific codepaths.

[cj.wijtmans]

How is it problematic? Unless you're talking about benchmarks, it's pretty normal for an engine to choose different code-paths for different hardware to achieve higher performance.
Perhaps some shader instructions execute faster on card A, but another different set of instructions (that achieve the same, or close to the same effect) will execute better on card B? Or maybe an API extension is better suited for vendor A, while the other extension that provides similar capabilities will be better of vendor B, even though both vendors support both extensions...

Remember we're talking about a game engine; a benchmark should of course execute exacly the same code eveywhere, even though hardware vendors often detect the benchmarking software and replace shaders with their own hand-crafter ones for speed.

Because a codepath can be really well optimized for one card but horrible for another even though the latter one has more potential due to its hardware. So you are not testing just your hardware but how well the code is optimized to your hardware. Ofcourse optimizations are desirable to get good performance but this can cause a lot of problems especially as your game ages and is not updated. Vulkan is meant to be abstracted by a dynamic library so it can be constantly updated and optimized even if your game ages and isnt updated. Otherwise the benefits of vulkan can be its downfall.

[bug77]

Because a codepath can be really well optimized for one card but horrible for another even though the latter one has more potential due to its hardware. So you are not testing just your hardware but how well the code is optimized to your hardware. Ofcourse optimizations are desirable to get good performance but this can cause a lot of problems especially as your game ages and is not updated. Vulkan is meant to be abstracted by a dynamic library so it can be constantly updated and optimized even if your game ages and isnt updated. Otherwise the benefits of vulkan can be its downfall.

I'm really curious where did you read that.
I was under the impression Vulkan drivers are meant to become a small shim between the hardware and applications. Thus, there's little left to optimize outside the application.

[dragorth]

I'm really curious where did you read that.
I was under the impression Vulkan drivers are meant to become a small shim between the hardware and applications. Thus, there's little left to optimize outside the application.

Did they mean that the dynamic library is updated for optimizing new cards, even if your game isn't updated?

[bug77]

Did they mean that the dynamic library is updated for optimizing new cards, even if your game isn't updated?

What "dynamic library"? I've never heard about this till today.
What would it contain?

[GreatEmerald]

Welp, this is the response I got when I tried to send it:
UNIGINE Mail Gateway: Your message was rejected by our spam filter. Please contact us at http://unigine.com/company/contacts/

I of couse don't have Facebook so I can't add it as a comment there, so if anyone else wants to send my report their way, feel free to do so: https://bpaste.net/raw/da8c9702874d

Looks like their detector completely failed to find most of the information about my GTX 660 with proprietary NVIDIA drivers.

[geearf]

How is it problematic? Unless you're talking about benchmarks, it's pretty normal for an engine to choose different code-paths for different hardware to achieve higher performance.
Perhaps some shader instructions execute faster on card A, but another different set of instructions (that achieve the same, or close to the same effect) will execute better on card B? Or maybe an API extension is better suited for vendor A, while the other extension that provides similar capabilities will be better of vendor B, even though both vendors support both extensions...

Remember we're talking about a game engine; a benchmark should of course execute exacly the same code eveywhere, even though hardware vendors often detect the benchmarking software and replace shaders with their own hand-crafter ones for speed.

Their post specifically mention the benchmark, not the engine, so I'm not sure what's the point of your reply.

[pete910]

Works fine for me, Don't do facebook so can't comment. Seriously, Why use FB for something like this

[cj.wijtmans]

What "dynamic library"? I've never heard about this till today.
What would it contain?

a dynamic library that uses vulkan not vulkan itself.

[bug77]

a dynamic library that uses vulkan not vulkan itself.

Again, tell me where you read about this. And what would it contain? Because you don't demand a lower level API just to put an abstraction layer on top of it.
I simply have no idea what you are talking about.