Or has the use of Middleware like Unreal Engine largely made them irrelevant? Or should EPIC put out a new Graphics API proposal?
Yes, the centralization of engines to Unreal, Unity, etc makes it so there’s less interest in pushing the boundaries, they are still pushed just on the GPU side.
From a CPU API perspective, it’s very close to just plain old buffer mapping and go. We would need a hardware shift that would add something more to the pipeline than what we currently do. Like when tesselation shaders came about from geometry shader practices.
Game developers create a RHI (rendering hardware interface) like discussed on the article, and go on with game development.
Because the greatest innovation thus far has been ray tracing and mesh shaders, and still they are largely ignored, so why keep on pushing forward?
Per-drawcall cost goes to nanosecond scale. Assuming you do drawcalls of course, this makes bindless and indirect rendering a bit easier so you could drop CPU cost to near-0 in a renderer.
It would also highly mitigate shader compiler hitches due to having a split pipeline instead of a monolythic one.
The simplification on barriers could improve performance a significant amount because currently, most engines that deal with Vulkan and DX12 need to keep track of individual texture layouts and transitions, and this completely removes such a thing.
Thankfully later versions have added escape hatches which cut out much of the mobile-specific bureaucracy, but it was grim for a while, and all that early API cruft is still there to confuse newcomers.
> Graphics APIs and shader languages have significantly increased in complexity over the past decade. It’s time to start discussing how to strip down the abstractions to simplify development, improve performance, and prepare for future GPU workloads.
Meaning ... SSDs initially reused IDE/SATA interfaces, which had inherent bottlenecks because those standards were designed for spinning disks.
To fully realize SSD performance, a new transport had to be built from the ground up, one that eliminated those legacy assumptions, constraints and complexities.
I also think that the way forward is to go back to software rendering, however this time around those algorithms and data structures are actually hardware accelerated as he points out.
Note that this is an ongoing trend on VFX industry already, about 5 years ago OTOY ported their OctaneRender into CUDA as the main rendering API.
I think it's fair to say that for most gamers, Vulkan/DX12 hasn't really been a net positive, the PSO problem affected many popular games and while Vulkan has been trying to improve, WebGPU is tricky as it has is roots on the first versions of Vulkan.
Perhaps it was a bad idea to go all in to a low level API that exposes many details when the hardware underneath is evolving so fast. Maybe CUDA, as the post says in some places, with its more generic computing support is the right way after all.
* GPU virtualization (e.g., the D3D residency APIs), to allow many applications to share GPU resources (e.g., HBM).
* Undefined behavior: how easy is it for applications to accidentally or intentionally take a dependency on undefined behavior? This can make it harder to translate this new API to an even newer API in the future.
But then game/engine devs want to use the vertex shader producing a uv coordinate and a normal together with a pixel shader that only reads the uv coordinate (or neither for shadow mapping) and don't want to pay for the bandwidth of the unused vertex outputs (or the cost of calculating them).
Or they want to be able to randomly enable any other pipeline stage like tessellation or geometry and the same shader should just work without any performance overhead.
vblanco•1h ago
I hope the IHVs have a look at it because current DX12 seems semi abandoned, with it not supporting buffer pointers even when every gpu made on the last 10 (or more!) years can do pointers just fine, and while Vulkan doesnt do a 2.0 release that cleans things, so it carries a lot of baggage, and specially, tons of drivers that dont implement the extensions that really improve things.
If this api existed, you could emulate openGL on top of this faster than current opengl to vulkan layers, and something like SDL3 gpu would get a 3x/4x boost too.
tadfisher•1h ago
I think this puts a floor on supported hardware though, like Nvidia 30xx and Radeon 5xxx. And of course motherboard support is a crapshoot until 2020 or so.
vblanco•1h ago
Bindless textures never needed any kind of resizable BAR, you have been able to use them since early 2010s on opengl through an extension. Buffer pointers also have never needed it.
pjmlp•1h ago
Vulkan is another mess, even if there was a 2.0, how are devs supposed to actually use it, especially on Android, the biggest consumer Vulkan platform?