Re: [9fans] Drawterm GPU (was: Software philosophy)

["Frank D. Engel, Jr." <fde101@fjrhome.net>]

Maybe /dev/gpgpu (general-purpose GPU) would be more to the point?


On 8/22/21 2:50 PM, sirjofri wrote:
>
> 22.08.2021 20:25:12 ori@eigenstate.org:
>
>> Quoth sirjofri <sirjofri+ml-9fans@sirjofri.de>:
>>>
>>> 22.08.2021 18:41:06 ori@eigenstate.org:
>>> Basically do software rendering on the GPU?
>>
>> Yes. Or software neural net evaluation on the GPU.
>> Or software video decoding on the GPU. Or software
>> image transforms on the GPU. Or software signal
>> processing on the GPU.
>>
>> If there's an interface to be selected, it needs
>> to be tractable to implement, *and* general purpose
>> enough for everything that wants to use it.
>>
>>> Well, it's totally possible. Even Nanite (the new system in Unreal 
>>> Engine
>>> 5) has its own rasterizer and I believe even its own base pass. Also
>>> Lumen does software rendering for global illumination.
>>>
>>> But for serious 3d AAA stuff we'd have to consider: Lumen is for 
>>> next-gen
>>> GPUs and Nanite for newer GPUs. We'll never reach their quality in
>>> realtime if we don't use the GPU features (built-in rasterizer, ...) to
>>> have enough free power for crazy software calculation.
>>
>> By the time any code is written, next-gen GPUs will be
>> previous-gen GPUs.
>>
>> General compute is what any hardware you buy a few years
>> from now will be doing -- and it's far more intersting
>> in terms of what capabilities it allows.
>>
>>> I like that /dev/compute approach, but may I suggest putting it below
>>> another directory /dev/gpu/compute so we have the ability to add
>>> /dev/gpu/{vertex,geometry,fragment,tessellation,pixel} later?
>>
>> I think supporting those is a cost we should not pay. It's
>> fundamentally solving a less general problem, and adds a
>> lot of complexity for the potential of a small performance
>> boost.
>>
>> We already have zero people sinking time into the slim
>> interface; sinking time into a fatter interface seems
>> like a bad idea.
> 
> Gotcha.
> 
> Maybe I'll find some time to implement some kind of gpufs or /dev/gpu
> (if it's general purpose I'd suggest renaming compute to gpu since
> "compute" could be anything. The computer does compute, wow.).
> 
> sirjofri

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