RADV Prepares To Switch Completely To Dynamic Rendering

[phoronix]

Phoronix: RADV Prepares To Switch Completely To Dynamic Rendering

One of the great things about Jason Ekstrand having joined Collabora at the start of the year is that the former Intel graphics engineer, who was on the team that created their original Vulkan driver, can now work on whatever open-source driver code he wishes. Among other upstream Mesa work, he's recently been contributing to the new "NVK" NVIDIA Vulkan driver and also the RADV driver too...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/RADV-Dynamic-Rendering-100p

[LinAGKar]

What is dynamic rendering anyway?

[dragon321]

What is dynamic rendering anyway?

tl;dr version: Let's you bypass the need for creating render pass objects and dealing with framebuffer by specifing needed things in command buffers. It makes rendering more simplified, especially in some cases.

[dev_null]

and to people not so involved in Vulkan and mesa what does it mean in practice ? like better performance or less code and less bugs ?

[V1tol]

Less code less bugs, and in very CPU limited apps it can lead to better performance. For games it may not have any difference since game engines heavily optimize their graphics pipelines themselves.

[CochainComplex]

Thx for explaining. I asked myself the same question.

[cl333r]

and to people not so involved in Vulkan and mesa what does it mean in practice ? like better performance or less code and less bugs ?

Using Vulkan in an app requires a lot of learning and work because Vulkan is very verbose and low level compared to OpenGL, the dynamic_rendering extension simplifies things, so it makes the lives of these developers easier.

[skeevy420]

Thx for explaining. I asked myself the same question.

Ditto. My assumption was it was gonna be like that Dynamic Resolution BS that some games offer and I'm glad it isn't.

[user1]

Ditto. My assumption was it was gonna be like that Dynamic Resolution BS that some games offer and I'm glad it isn't.

Yeah, I'm also not a fan of all those quality lowering techniques for the sake of performance. But it seems Radv devs sometimes experiment with variable rate shading stuff (which I guess is similar to Dynamic Resolution in games because it lowers the quality of certain objects). For example, I found this MR which wants to enable VRS by default in a certain case.
Idk, maybe that specific MR is not what it seems, so if there's any Radv developer out here, correct me if I'm wrong.

[skeevy420]

Yeah, I'm also not a fan of all those quality lowering techniques for the sake of performance. But it seems Radv devs sometimes experiment with variable rate shading stuff (which I guess is similar to Dynamic Resolution in games because it lowers the quality of certain objects). For example, I found this MR which wants to enable VRS by default in a certain case.
Idk, maybe that specific MR is not what it seems, so if there's any Radv developer out here, correct me if I'm wrong.

Anecdotal because I've disabled it for so long, but the few times I've used those resolution features in games I found it was better to just disable it and adjust the settings to match my resolution and frame rate.

VRS can be like running Ultra settings on your character and stuff center screen and Medium on the outskirts. NVIDIA's example is a racing game and having the car nice and the stuff on the sides your passing at 150mph being rendered in a lower quality and in VR and having what's in your direct vision be rendered higher than what's in your peripheral vision.

IMHO, VRS wouldn't be a bad default setting if it only worked up -- If it let us use Medium but rendered as High or Ultra whenever possible; set an acceptable minimal baseline for quality. I don't think I'd notice texture changes on non-important objects as much I notice the resolution going up and down and that blur in and out feeling I get when dynamic resolution is done screen-wide.