The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

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Re: The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by yum13241 »

That's great! (The weather, not the sickness)



My right hand is also finally fine (I punched someone, [don't ask why] and then I couldn't use my hand as well as a could [pushing deep buttons for example hurted] but today I seem fine.


I also checked out the SMOOTHED and Black Ops mods, and they are great too! I highly recommend trying them out (I didn't make this). A source port that supports DEHEXTRA is required. (most source ports do, chocolate doom is one famous exception)
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Re: The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by zdusr »

Had break from zdoom.org. Got my acc deactivated. Got it now activated again.
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Re: The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by InsanityBringer »

Seemingly, every time I sit down and start doing something with Vulkan again, a new extension comes out that adds some feature that's either really powerful or somewhat convenient

Maybe I should do this more often, if I do it enough times maybe Vulkan will become the most amazing thing to exist. Though unlike things like dynamic rendering, I suspect my old card probably won't support this. I should probably replace it soonish, it seems like it's acting up more than usual these last few months, with display driver crashes and other fun times.
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Re: The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by dpJudas »

As nice as those newer extensions are, unfortunately GZDoom can't really easily use them because it must still support GPUs only supporting older versions of Vulkan. Note that there is an older extension related to the one they mention there: VK_EXT_DESCRIPTOR_INDEXING. This one also lets you specify textures by index and is fairly old as it also exists even in OpenGL.

That article also nicely illustrates what is wrong with khronos and vulkan. They assume everyone have the resources to just write their own JIT for their renderer. They don't even bother anymore make it easy to figure out what they are changing for vulkan - you pretty much have to scavenge it out of blog posts and such.
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Re: The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Graf Zahl »

I still remenber that the whole texture indexing thing (aka bindless textures) was omitted from vulkan because Intel had no support for it. And thus we got the current monstrosity, that most hardware never, ever needed.
Regarding Vulkan as a whole, I have to agree. I have no idea where things may head, but it seems Microsoft and D3D12 are a lot better organized than the KIhronos committees. Just like it was in the past with OpenGL...

And yet, here we are - still needing support for OpenGL 3.3 because some people run computers that are more than a decade old and were equipped with graphics hardware that was already bad when the computer was built...
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Re: The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Rachael »

If we had someone willing to create a DX12 backend we'd be golden. Especially since even if your card doesn't support DX12 features, your system will still at least run what it can on the GPU and emulate whatever it can't on the CPU.
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Re: The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by yum13241 »

And yet, here we are - still needing support for OpenGL 3.3 because some people run computers that are more than a decade old and were equipped with graphics hardware that was already bad when the computer was built...
Go sue HP and come back LOL.

If we had someone willing to create a DX12 backend we'd be golden. Especially since even if your card doesn't support DX12 features, your system will still at least run what it can on the GPU and emulate whatever it can't on the CPU.
Non-Windows OSes be like: Am I a joke to you? (I don't actually mean this)


Also what I last did: Watch Minecraft just not work under Linux.
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Re: The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Graf Zahl »

yum13241 wrote: Sun Nov 27, 2022 11:30 am
And yet, here we are - still needing support for OpenGL 3.3 because some people run computers that are more than a decade old and were equipped with graphics hardware that was already bad when the computer was built...
Go sue HP and come back LOL.
I'd rather sue Intel which were the actual guilty party here. What they put into their CPUs for far too long was just a joke.
But it seems to be a repeating story that support for obsolete hardware can't even be ditched after a full decade.
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Re: The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Rachael »

yum13241 wrote: Sun Nov 27, 2022 11:30 am Non-Windows OSes be like: Am I a joke to you? (I don't actually mean this)
Non-Windows OS's have their own problems to deal with. Vulkan is great for Linux, though, and it even runs on older or underpowered devices pretty well as long as your GPU supports the basic features it requires - manufacturer support be damned. Mesa's Vulkan layers are great, and do pretty well considering the massive diversity of hardware that they have to support for it. A bit problematic on older (pre-RTX) NVidias, though, but NVidia does provide their own (problematic) drivers for Linux and that helps.

DX12 is great for Windows though because it's the primary support for any competing GPU chipset maker (there are 3 right now, that really matter). Even lazy chipset developers like Qualcomm (who notably refuse to write their own OpenGL or Vulkan drivers for Windows) support it.

And for Apple, we have (for now) MoltenVK which runs a Vulkan API layer atop Metal, but this is far from ideal. There was a PR sometime back for native Metal support, but it was never really completed.
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Re: The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Graf Zahl »

TBH, I think long term we have to consider some middleware layer as it is unfeasible to have 3 backends for 3 OSs. MoltenVK seems to work well enough on ARM Macs, though, it's the old Intel ones where it struggles - but this hardware sucks anyway, and in the short time the ARM Macs have been available, they already displaced half of the Intel Macs.

I'm not that convinced we need support for the last pre-Vulkan generation that can partialy support D3D12. The vast majority of older systems in the last survey are those which couldn't do it anyway. We'd maybe gain 1% with such a move.
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Re: The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by dpJudas »

I'm not sure if the practically dead Windows ARM (Qualcomm) should really be the deciding factor for which graphics API to use. Unlike OpenGL, I've yet to have run into any serious issues with Vulkan on Windows. I fail to see the strong argument for a native DX12 backend here.

I also wonder why MoltenVK is "far from ideal" - it seems to be working perfectly fine ever since _mental_ hooked it up. The only issue I recall is the vsync thing (*), which seems to be more of an OS bug than something to do with MoltenVK. Apple is such a terrible company nowadays anyway that I would just drop support for the platform if they ever did anything that sabotaged MoltenVK. As a developer they have been asking me to fuck off for a very long time now and that's exactly what I intend to do!

*) Note that the lower dynamic light performance compared to OpenGL on old macs have nothing to do with MoltenVK. That is happening because I didn't bother implement the uniform buffer path for Intels.
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Re: The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Rachael »

Never said it should be the deciding factor - just something that could be relied on, with the amount of support that is built around it. The Qualcomm comment was just to enhance the point that DirectX - being Microsoft's child prodigy - seemed to be a very strong API to develop on. That someone as dumb with graphics API support as Qualcomm had enough sense at least to support that with their chipset drivers.

And the reason why I said that about MoltenVK was because it's a wrapper - maybe I just have had bad experience with wrappers but I've always found that native calls to the API in question often were faster. There are exceptions of course - depending on how the game in question is coded. For instance, with some hardware, Unreal running on the Glide wrapper actually performed much better than Unreal's own D3D code.
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Re: The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by dpJudas »

If you don't like wrappers I guess you don't like Graf's suggested solution either. A middleware layer is just a different word for a wrapper. :)

As for Qualcomm supporting DX that's because Microsoft gave them no choice. Which is also why Windows ARM is just a terrible idea to begin with. A locked down version of Windows - yay! Beyond the hardware fascination of playing with ARM processors I really hope that Windows ARM go nowhere. Luckily that also seems to be the case. It really is a shitty value proposition for the consumer.
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Re: The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Rachael »

I suppose every wrapper is different - in the case of OpenGL wrappers though - they try and emulate OpenGL using a completely different API and this can have lots of different quirks that have to be emulated with the different calls, that may work differently in say, for example, d3d9 (Which was the most common one I've seen). But yes, in general, I have not had good experience with wrappers, and even so, I still wonder if MoltenVK versus bare Metal would make much difference even on an M1 Mac - I suspect it would - though, it's obviously Apple's own damn problem that they did the closed garden thing and kept native Vulkan drivers from ever appearing on their platform, and I definitely won't defend them doing that. That doesn't mean that I want wrappers completely removed from existence, though - I'd rather they only be needed as a backup solution. I still hope that Zink gets improvements enough to really work well and replace AMD's OpenGL, someday, for example - because right now I trust Mesa to do a better job with it, even if they do route the calls to Vulkan, than I trust AMD developers themselves to handle OpenGL - even though they clearly have bare-metal access to their own GPU's.

With Graf proposing a middleware layer - if he's talking about a system like how Quake 2 did it with ref_soft and ref_gl - I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing - you could probably consider the ref_*.dll files wrappers, too, but they are form-fitted towards the game and are only functional for the things the game needs them to do - they are not trying to emulate a whole entire library.

As for Windows ARM - I do disagree with you there, but not because I like locked down systems - I actually am hoping Microsoft embraces openness with the ARM platform and lets you install Windows on whatever-the-hell device has an unlocked boot loader.
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Re: The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Cacodemon345 »

Companies are still continuing their push for Windows on ARM, because Apple certainly won't be looking back at Intel anymore. MediaTek is also aiming at Windows on ARM, which was confirmed this month.

We need more competition in the CPU space, not less, especially after enduring the x86 monopoly/duopoly in the PC market. There will be always ARM SBCs that aren't infested with Secure Boot bullshit, but there may not be one for x86 computers in the future.
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