[libre-riscv-dev] Vulkanizing

[Jacob Lifshay]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2020, 10:55 Scheming Pony <scheming-pony at protonmail.com>
wrote:

> But, OK given your anti-SMT logic why not throw away Vulkan, the
> descendent of OpenGL, meant for SIMD GPU designs?  For the prototype use
> OpenGL 3.1.  You have painted yourself back into the original design case
> for OpenGL anyway.  It would run Curv and my Open Inventor 3D Lisp
> desktop.  Doug pointed out that we might have to add a patch for
> "noise()".  Many, many people know OpenGL and use it everyday.  It's like
> the "make" thing I guess, will we ever get rid of Autotools?
>

The reasons we're using Vulkan instead of OpenGL are that Vulkan scales to
multithreaded applications much better, Vulkan is also much lower level --
reducing the amount of work needed by a factor of several times. Vulkan
also supports compute shaders, which is much more general, rather than
transform feedback by default (though there is an extension to re-add
transform feedback). Also, Vulkan is used as the common target for Graphics
API translators, so all of DX11, DX12, OpenGL, OpenGL ES, and more can all
be run relatively efficiently on top of Vulkan. That's just some of the
reasons, there are a lot more.

Jacob