Vulkan

So I've been told so I'm trying to take another look at it. At least the examples at https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan, which are probably not 1.3/1.4 yet except for the trianglevulkan13 example, are pure insanity. Coming from CUDA, I can't fathom why what should be simple things like malloc, memcpy and kernel launches, end up needing 300x as many lines.

Might be getting better but just yesterday I dabbled in Vulkan again, digging through the examples from https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan, and the complexity is pure insanity. What should be a simple malloc ends up being 40 lines of code, what should be a simple memcpy is another 30 lines of code, and what should be a single-line kernel launch is another 50 lines of bindings, layouts, pipelines, etc.

Sure, and as I said that's what I agree with the author on in this case. The hard part isn't the actual API calls, it's all the jargon and such around them as you say. In contrast, take something like say Vulkan. That's an API I'd consider to be quite complex. It has a vast number of function calls. You need to worry about ordering, using semaphores and fences to make sure things happen correctly. You need to understand the underlying hardware model. You need to compile shaders offline into a separate IR binary, which you then load at runtime. And so on... I mean, just check out the official "hello triangle" example[1]. And here[2] for a version which doesn't rely on additional helper functions. [1]: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Samples/blob/main/sam... [2]: https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan/blob/master/examples...

Wow. triangle.cpp 1181 lines (1048 loc) · 56.2 KB z80.cpp 493 lines (440 loc) · 19.3 KB z80.h 37 lines (30 loc) · 720 Bytes https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan/blob/master/examples... https://github.com/rasky/cz80/blob/master/z80.cpp

You can both build command buffers simultaneously (example by Sascha Willems: https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan/blob/master/examples...) and submit unrelated command buffers to different queues simultaneously. Using multiple queues is not difficult, just somewhat rare: there should never be so many command submissions that parallelization matters for quantitative performance reasons, it's a niche for unusually independent and/or asynchronous tasks.

Vulkan for better or worse seems super targeted at AAA gamedevs, here's a probably unfair 1189 line example of how to show a triangle: https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan/blob/master/examples...

Here's a 1192 line example that draws a colored triangle: https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan/blob/master/examples...

I'm not quite sure what Apple were expecting, when they have shown a clear contempt for OpenGL by leaving it at version 4.1 (while everyone else is up to 4.5, even Mesa). But to the people saying use Vulkan for the web API, that wouldn't be a good idea. Vulkan is a very verbose low level API. Here[1] is a sample for the most basic of renderers (renders a single triangle). That's 1,000 lines of (commented) code. It's not a good fit for web development. A far better solution would be to evolve the current WebGL API, than shoehorn Vulkan into somewhere it was never meant to be. [1] https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan/blob/master/triangle...

It might be this: https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan

Quick Vulkan starter pack (if you just want to see if it runs on your system, without compiling anything). Windows-centric, but many things also available for Linux and Android. ------- Drivers ------- Nvidia GPU driver: https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-driver (worth trying even if your GPU is not listed as supported, e.g. 900 series mobile Maxwell GPUs like GTX 970M or GTX 980M work ok) AMD GPU driver: http://support.amd.com/en-us/kb-articles/Pages/Radeon-Vulkan... ------- Demos ------- Nvidia Vulkan Choppers demo: https://nvidia.app.box.com/s/rj9nzxkpz21qu34h8zew301kray9urb... Nvidia Vulkan Fish demo (threaded rendering): http://developer.download.nvidia.com/mobile/shield/assets/Th... Vulkan examples binaries by Sascha Willems: http://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/examples.php - requires assets from source distribution (create "bin" subfolder a

Examples and demos : https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan