Targeting Vulkan and SPIR-V

[Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 7 March 2015 at 08:41:26 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Saturday, 7 March 2015 at 07:44:18 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
>> It is not clear how quickly Vulkan compliant hardware will 
>> appear, a lot
>
> It already exits. Even PowerVR has an (experimental) 
> implementation already...
>
>> Also, of course, there is the huge problem of moving the AAA 
>> games world
>> over to all this.
>
> Not really, since it is a lot like Mantle...
>
> Vulkan isn't particularly innovative, it is a trip back in time 
> where you have to target the hardware and not the API. 
> Manufacturers like it because there is no point in having high 
> powered GPUs if the applications are  CPU bound and Vulkan 
> get's around that.
>
> But not having an abstraction over the hardware means that devs 
> will suffer, do manual memory management on the GPU, write 
> their own mipmap format routines etc. And you bet the vendors 
> will add all kinds of extensions to it to stay competitive and 
> we will end up with a mess.

I saw a comment in a random forum entry that I cannot recall, 
that stated an Hello World (triangle) is around 800 lines of C 
code.


Of course, this doesn't matter when using engines, which every 
sane developer should do anyway.

Any applications coded straight to graphics APIs ends up being a 
use case specific mini engine.

--
Paulo