DConf 2014 Day 2 Talk 3: Designing an Aurora: A Glimpse at the Graphical Future of D by Adam Wilson

Tofu Ninja via Digitalmars-d-announce digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com
Wed Jul 9 08:03:11 PDT 2014


On Wednesday, 9 July 2014 at 05:30:21 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> That's true, but OpenGL is being left behind now that there is 
> a push to match the low level of how GPU drivers work.

As I said, ALL api's are converging on low level access, this 
includes opengl. This means that all major api's are moving to a 
buffer+shader model because this is what the hardware likes(there 
is some more interesting things with command buffers that is 
happening also).

> Apple's Metal is oriented towards the tiled PowerVR and 
> scenegraphs,

I am not exactly sure where you are get that idea, Metal is the 
same, buffers+shaders. The major difference is the command buffer 
that is being explicitly exposed, this is actually what is meant 
when they say that the the api is getting closer to the hardware. 
In current api's(dx/ogl) the command buffers are hidden from the 
user and constructed behind the scenes, in dx is is done by 
Microsoft and in ogl it is done by the driver(nvidia/amd/intel). 
There has been a push recently for this to be exposed to the user 
in some form, this is what metal does, I believe mantel does 
something similar but I can't be sure because they have not 
released any documentation.


> probably also with some expectations of supporting the upcoming 
> raytracing accelerators.

I doubt it.

> AMD is in talks with Intel (rumour) with the intent of 
> cooperating on Mantle.

I don't know anything about that but I also doubt it.

> Direct-X is going lower level… So, there is really no stability 
> in the API at the lower level.

On the contrary, all this movement towards low level API is 
actually causing the API's to all look vary similar.

>
> But yes, OpenGL is not particularly suitable for rendering a 
> scene graph without an optimizing engine to reduce context 
> switches.

I was not talking explicitly about ogl, I am just talking about 
video cards in general.

> Actually, modern 2D APIs like Apple's Quartz are backend 
> "independent" and render to PDF. Native PDF support is 
> important if you want to have an advantage in the web space and 
> in the application space in general.

This does not really have any thing to do with what I am talking 
about. I am talking about hardware accelerated graphics, once it 
gets into the hardware(gpu), there is no real difference between 
2d and 3d.

> There is almost no chance anyone wanting to do 3D would use 
> something like Aurora… If you can handle 3D math you also can 
> do OpenGL, Mantle, Metal?

As it stands now, that may be the case, but I honestly don't see 
a reason it must be so.

> But then again, the official status for Aurora is kind of 
> unclear.

This is true.


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