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 Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 06:57 Post subject: AMD says PC graphics suck because of DX, proposes to kill it |
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http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2011/03/16/farewell-to-directx/1
| Quote: | 'It's funny,' says AMD's worldwide developer relations manager of its GPU division, Richard Huddy. 'We often have at least ten times as much horsepower as an Xbox 360 or a PS3 in a high-end graphics card, yet it's very clear that the games don't look ten times as good. To a significant extent, that's because, one way or another, for good reasons and bad - mostly good, DirectX is getting in the way.' Huddy says that one of the most common requests he gets from game developers is: 'Make the API go away.'
'I certainly hear this in my conversations with games developers,' he says, 'and I guess it was actually the primary appeal of Larrabee to developers – not the hardware, which was hot and slow and unimpressive, but the software – being able to have total control over the machine, which is what the very best games developers want. By giving you access to the hardware at the very low level, you give games developers a chance to innovate, and that's going to put pressure on Microsoft – no doubt at all.' |
| Quote: | | On consoles, you can draw maybe 10,000 or 20,000 chunks of geometry in a frame, and you can do that at 30-60fps. On a PC, you can't typically draw more than 2-3,000 without getting into trouble with performance, and that's quite surprising - the PC can actually show you only a tenth of the performance if you need a separate batch for each draw call. |
| Quote: | | Indeed, Crytek's R&D technical director, Michael Glueck, said 'yes, that would appeal to us,' when he heard about Huddy's claims. However, he also seemed surprised, pointing out that 'AMD is the biggest force driving the OpenCL standard; it even released drivers to run OpenCL on SSE2 and that's kind of a way to remove low-level hardware access for simple compute tasks.' |
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
~ WHAT THEY'RE TRYING TO SAY CAN ONLY BE SEEN ~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHTUOgYNRzY
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 07:01 Post subject: |
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Can't let PC GFX go too far ahead. Microsoft needs their 360 derps.
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dr-nix
Posts: 996
Location: Sweden
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 07:06 Post subject: |
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| dr-nix wrote: | yes please get rid of DX, opens the field up wide for linux gaming in my book  |
Directx isn't the reason nobody bothers to create linux ports.
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
~ WHAT THEY'RE TRYING TO SAY CAN ONLY BE SEEN ~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHTUOgYNRzY |
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 07:08 Post subject: |
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| kenny64 wrote: | | Can't let PC GFX go too far ahead. Microsoft needs their 360 derps. |
I assume you mean DirectX contains artificial restrictions by Microsoft?
That's not what AMD's Richard Huddy says. He could have replaced DirectX with OpenGL in his speech, it wouldn't make any difference, the same restrictions are there as well.
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
~ WHAT THEY'RE TRYING TO SAY CAN ONLY BE SEEN ~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHTUOgYNRzY |
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 07:13 Post subject: |
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 07:44 Post subject: |
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 08:20 Post subject: |
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Tim Sweeney extensively debated this in 2010: http://www.semiaccurate.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3361
I'm in favour of the entirely software driven approach, where next generation applications implement a graphics pipeline 100% from the ground up in software. And that could run on an architecture like Larrabee from Intel, or it could run on an Nvidia GPU using a programming language like CUDA. I really feel that we are very close to the end of the line with DirectX, we're at this point of diminishing returns where if you give us 10 or 100 times better hardware performance we'll only be able to deliver graphics that are incrementally better, not actually have another revolution in graphics. If you see the artifacts in games they are all all the same things, they're pixel aliasing, they're bi-linear sampling artifacts on textures, they're all the artifacts with specular lighting which arise from DirectX.
--
Yeah we're certainly horribly constrained by fixed function hardware right now, i mean if you look at the texture samplers on current GPU's, they are at the same basic design and have the same limitations as in the very beginning in 1997. They are these crappy 8-bit devices that do a two way filtering operation between 4 samples. So you get these terrible artifacts where specular lighting now becomes bumpy because of this linear equation being applied instead of a higher order equation. You have sampling artifacts showing, you have directional artifacts and on top of that you have all the artifacts that arise from rasterization. You know, aliasing everywhere, shimmering pixels, edges of characters looking flaky in games. These are all artifacts of the fixed function hardware, and if we were simply writing code in software to produce pixels and not using these fixed function units then we'd be free of those constraints and you can bet we would have solved them by now. Look at what we did with Unreal Engine 1 back in 1996, it was a very impressive software renderer at the time, and if we had continued the software rendering trend I'm damn certain we wouldn't have the artifacts we have today due to DirectX.
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
~ WHAT THEY'RE TRYING TO SAY CAN ONLY BE SEEN ~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHTUOgYNRzY
Last edited by consolitis on Thu, 17th Mar 2011 11:18; edited 1 time in total
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 08:28 Post subject: |
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| consolitis wrote: | | kenny64 wrote: | | Can't let PC GFX go too far ahead. Microsoft needs their 360 derps. |
I assume you mean DirectX contains artificial restrictions by Microsoft?
That's not what AMD's Richard Huddy says. He could have replaced DirectX with OpenGL in his speech, it wouldn't make any difference, the same restrictions are there as well. |
Not perse artificial restrictions , though i wouldn't be surprised. But he def. says that game devs want to get rid of the DirectX API because it has been more and more developed with the xbox360 in mind.
| Quote: | The DirectX Performance Overhead
So what sort of performance-overhead are we talking about here? Is DirectX really that big a barrier to high-speed PC gaming? This, of course, depends on the nature of the game you're developing.
'It can vary from almost nothing at all to a huge overhead,' says Huddy. 'If you're just rendering a screen full of pixels which are not terribly complicated, then typically a PC will do just as good a job as a console. These days we have so much horsepower on PCs that on high-resolutions you see some pretty extraordinary-looking PC games, but one of the things that you don't see in PC gaming inside the software architecture is the kind of stuff that we see on consoles all the time. |
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 08:39 Post subject: |
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| Hellhound666 wrote: | | But he def. says that game devs want to get rid of the DirectX API because it has been more and more developed with the xbox360 in mind. |
No he doesn't say that, anywhere at all. The article is about the possibility of bypassing the API and "writing directly to the metal" something which is often done on consoles because they have fixed hardware, but can't be done on the PC because everyone of us uses different components, so the use of the DX layer is necessary.
| Quote: | | Of course, the ability to program direct-to-metal (directly to the hardware, rather than going through a standardised software API) is a no-brainer when it comes to consoles, particularly when they're nearing the end of their lifespan. When a console is first launched, you'll want an API so that you can develop good-looking and stable games quickly, but it makes sense to go direct-to-metal towards the end of the console's life, when you're looking to squeeze out as much performance as possible. |
| Quote: | | Consoles also have a major bonus over PCs here, which is their fixed architecture. If you program direct-to-metal on the PlayStation 3's GPU, then you know your code will work on every PS3. The same can't be said on the PC, where we have numerous different GPU architectures from different manufacturers that work in different ways. |
| Quote: | | 'Having direct access to hardware would mean no drivers magically translating your byte code once again, and also having low-level memory management available.... |
Essentially the article is not so much about how bloated the DX API is, but about the possibility of bypassing any kind of API for direct access to the hardware..
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
~ WHAT THEY'RE TRYING TO SAY CAN ONLY BE SEEN ~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHTUOgYNRzY |
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 08:46 Post subject: |
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Simple. MS and Sony will not ship your game until you fix it. There's no cert process on the PC.. (well GFWL has one, but I won't comment on it  )
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
~ WHAT THEY'RE TRYING TO SAY CAN ONLY BE SEEN ~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHTUOgYNRzY
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 08:57 Post subject: |
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Yes i understand , but thats not gonna happen with so many players in the ballpark.
However, programming for the 360 and PS3 is also dx versus ogl from what i understand (don't have a console). So maybe it's only between ATI and Nvidia you need to worry about. There is definitely a need of something to happen because right now PC gaming is at a pretty low. Most of the time holding the PC back these days are shitty ports (not only from a gaming standpoint but from an optimisation standpoint as well).
I don't think we'll see CUDA games any time soon though.
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 09:05 Post subject: |
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LeoNatan
Banned
Posts: 73193
Location: Ramat Gan, Israel 🇮🇱
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 09:08 Post subject: |
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| consolitis wrote: | | Simple. MS and Sony will not ship your game until you fix it. |
That's only in theory. Completely bullocks in real-world scenarios - we've seen many games buggy enough to be considered betas go through the cert process like champs. |
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 09:12 Post subject: |
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| iNatan wrote: | | consolitis wrote: | | Simple. MS and Sony will not ship your game until you fix it. |
That's only in theory. Completely bullocks in real-world scenarios - we've seen many games buggy enough to be considered betas go through the cert process like champs. |
The buggiest console games are less.. buggy than the buggiest PC games.
You are not going to see consoles games where the sound doesn't play at all, or whatever.
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
~ WHAT THEY'RE TRYING TO SAY CAN ONLY BE SEEN ~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHTUOgYNRzY |
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 09:14 Post subject: |
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And some Gabe Newell input for good measure:
| Quote: | Performance and scaling has stopped being a hardware problem and instead it’s been turned into a software problem. That’s bad news for us software guys – but for hardware it’s good news, because it shifts the value proposition towards software developers. What it also means is clock rates will stay pretty much the same, but the number of execution units you have is going to explode. The good news is that we’re going to spend an era of growing linearly for a while, so transistor budgets will translate directly to improvements.
At that point we said, we understand we have to make these investments in multi-core. We have to worry about not just two cores, but 64 threads; 512 threads – how are we going to reorganise it? What does that look like? But the more we look at it, the more excited we get. This current era is one of heterogeneous computing: you’ve got this one big chunk of code doing physics and AI, character animation and facial systems talking through this strange interface called DirectX to another chunk of your code which you write to run on GPUs. That’s just going to go away. And either Nvidia or Intel is going to win the battle for whose array of cores is taken up. |
| Quote: | | GN: I think that (Ageia's discrete PhysX PPU cards) is a horrible idea. At the same time that the distinction between the GPU and CPU is going away the PPU guys want to come in and define a new set of abstractions, where we have memory and data that’s really far away from the CPU and CPU... How do I tell when something breaks, or gets pushed by a monster? All these decisions I have on my CPU have to sit around until they are resolved on the PPU and GPU, and you end up with a physics decelerator. This is the reason you want a homogenous architecture. |
Specifically he believed in Larrabee's homogenous architecture winning and writing x86 code for everything, be it graphics, AI, physics..
| Quote: | | In general we see the distinction between GPU and CPU going away, and deeply multi-core architectures replacing them. They will be homogeneous cores as far as instruction set (or enough of the instruction set for it to be irrelevant most of the time to software development). Larrabee is a step towards the x86 architecture being deeply multi-core and the x86 instruction set extended to do graphics. All of our code will have to get rewritten to be a mix of fine and coarse grained threads. |
| Quote: | One of those changes would be something like Larrabee. To date we’ve seen traditional CPU architectural styles best exemplified by Intel’s CPU’s and then you’ve had a different architectural approach to what is essentially a CPU on the GPU side, which is something that we...in the various names for it Massively Multi-Core is one name for it or Through-Put Computing is another approach to it. I think at this point it’s pretty clearly demonstrated that there’s a limit to the sort of out-of-order execution approach that’s been used and that the through-put architecture is the right approach in the long run. The good news for that is that the same gigantic performance games that we’ve seen over the last few years and 3d rendering are going to now apply to every aspect of a game. You know your physics will scale the same way, your graphics have scaled, and your AI will suddenly have a huge amounts of opportunity to improve and the cool thing is that if your AI isn’t running fast enough all you have to do is reduce your resolution and now suddenly you have extra CPU cycles available to spend on AI and in the past you haven’t had that scalability knob that a user can control and set themselves. It’s like you would sort of allocate a fixed amount of CPU to these various tasks because you ended up making a bunch of least-common denominator decisions about a lot of the things that makes games, games as opposed to movies and when you move towards these other architectures that goes away. So I think you get this huge scalability improvement and we also get much more granularity and allocating those resources which is good news for all of the other pieces.
But that also requires you to go back and rethink a whole bunch of architectural decisions. You need to, in a very detailed way, go back and make sure that you’re optimised for that kind of approach. Scaling up to a couple of cores is one thing but scaling up to, you know, 34 or 64 and greater threads of execution require you to have a different way of thinking about the work-flow inside of your engine. That would be a kind of example where you’d need a fairly large jump in your engine architecture to take advantage of it. We’re big fans of Larrabee. We think Larrabee is the logical response to everything that’s been learned over the last few years about the importance of through-put computing and we’re really excited to see that architecture sort of proliferate, you know, not just as a graphics architecture but as a general computing architecture. |
As I understand it, pretty much same beliefs as Epic' Sweeney though Sweeney didn't have a favorite between nvidia's (CUDA) or intel's (Larrabee's) architecture/solution, while Gabe clearly prefers intel's.
But since Larrabee has been delayed/repurposed who knows when this "new era" he was hoping for will come..
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
~ WHAT THEY'RE TRYING TO SAY CAN ONLY BE SEEN ~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHTUOgYNRzY
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crossmr
Posts: 2965
Location: South Korea
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 10:09 Post subject: |
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If this were true, wouldn't openGL be 10x ahead of direct x?
Intel i5 6500 3.2Ghz, Geforce 970GTX 2GB, 16 GB Ram, Windows 7
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 10:32 Post subject: |
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| crossmr wrote: | | If this were true, wouldn't openGL be 10x ahead of direct x? |
As far as commercial game development is concerned, OpenGL is almost universally(*) considered to have been surpassed in terms of functionality/efficiency for quite some time (although that might not be the case for the very most recent versions) and the performance is often quite a bit slower, mostly due to the fact gpu manufacturers and especially AMD see no point in optimizing their drivers for it, since every game uses DX. So AFAIK at best OpenGL is about the same and certainly not significantly better.
If it offered a significantly reduced overhead, AMD and Crytek would suggest a move to OpenGL, but that's not the case, hence why they didn't mention it at all, instead they proposed completely bypassing any API (or developing an ultra-thin one: "It definitely makes sense to have a standardised, vendor-independent API as an abstraction layer over the hardware, but we would also prefer this API to be really thin and allow more low-level access to the hardware.").
(*) There are still a few hardcore supporters of OpenGL, most of them being open-source/linux/you-name-it folks, that insist everybody that says dx is superior is on Microsoft's payroll  same for all PC developers that sold their soul to the devil called Microsoft, except their God, Carmack, but that's not the case anymore, is it?  http://www.nfohump.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1441290#1441290
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
~ WHAT THEY'RE TRYING TO SAY CAN ONLY BE SEEN ~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHTUOgYNRzY
Last edited by consolitis on Thu, 17th Mar 2011 10:48; edited 3 times in total |
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 10:33 Post subject: |
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He gave Direct X as an example because it's the most popular one. They want to get rid of all intermediaries, OpenGL is one of those.
How will a developer cope with the millions of different PC configurations wihtout some common denominator?
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 10:44 Post subject: |
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| Mister_s wrote: | He gave Direct X as an example because it's the most popular one. They want to get rid of all intermediaries, OpenGL is one of those.
How will a developer cope with the millions of different PC configurations wihtout some common denominator? |
We need console cycle releases for GPUs (AMD and nvidia to manufacture only 1-2 GPUs for every 5 years), and every time you buy a new one, all your previous games might not play at all. Basically bringing all the console disadvantages to PC gaming
or
If Larrabee were to succeed, and nvidia and AMD were to make compatible hardware, would this issue still exist? I mean when you write x86, you don't have (much? at all?) to worry about supporting all x86 processors released by intel and amd, correct?
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
~ WHAT THEY'RE TRYING TO SAY CAN ONLY BE SEEN ~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHTUOgYNRzY |
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 10:49 Post subject: |
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Well just what I thought then. Draw every GPU producer (AMD/NVidia/Intel) to one general spot and basically kill technologic advancements. I'm not going to say I like that with every game one brand works better than the other, but atleast this way they try to screw each other over and come up with new technologies. Now the consumer wins because there's heavy competition, if this happens the dev/manufactirer will win because most of it will be standardized. I like standardization of technology, keeps everything neat and simple, but it's a big nono for GPUs imo. Shit idea, he tries to save himself work by creating one giant standard PC platform.
PS. I know I'm exaggerating with teh "one big PC platform" thing.
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 10:55 Post subject: |
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(Not that I know well what I am talking about  but) Why do you think it would kill technological advancements? CPUs are advancing just fine while maintaining excellent compatibility (all x86 programs, even those from the late 70s(?), I believe they can run on today's multicore CPUs by intel and amd)
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
~ WHAT THEY'RE TRYING TO SAY CAN ONLY BE SEEN ~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHTUOgYNRzY
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Frant
King's Bounty
Posts: 24517
Location: Your Mom
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 11:30 Post subject: |
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But this is all conjecture. In reality the games of today are limited by consoles since most games are multiplatform, using the same engine and assets with only superficial differences (resolution, higher texture resolution etc.).
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
"The sky was the color of a TV tuned to a dead station" - Neuromancer
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 11:43 Post subject: |
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| Frant wrote: | | But this is all conjecture. In reality the games of today are limited by consoles since most games are multiplatform, using the same engine and assets with only superficial differences (resolution, higher texture resolution etc.). |
Of course, that is true, but generally speaking, there's no reason to not look into improving how efficiently the PC hardware is used
Perhaps years ago, using the hardware more efficiently would (almost) directly translate into developers making more impressive games, while today perhaps it won't make much difference in terms of what you can achieve with top end hardware but it can have other effects (such as cheaper hardware performing very impressively, laptop gaming becoming a valid alternative, etc).
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
~ WHAT THEY'RE TRYING TO SAY CAN ONLY BE SEEN ~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHTUOgYNRzY |
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LeoNatan
Banned
Posts: 73193
Location: Ramat Gan, Israel 🇮🇱
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 15:20 Post subject: |
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| consolitis wrote: | | (*) There are still a few hardcore supporters of OpenGL, most of them being open-source/linux/you-name-it folks, that insist everybody that says dx is superior is on Microsoft's payroll same for all PC developers that sold their soul to the devil called Microsoft, except their God, Carmack, but that's not the case anymore, is it? http://www.nfohump.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=1441290#1441290 |
So true. |
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(Nexus)
Posts: 2807
Location: 192.168.1.72
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| Posted: Thu, 17th Mar 2011 15:55 Post subject: |
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No marketshare, difficult to support (different distros, behave.. differently).
TWIN PEAKS is "something of a miracle."
"...like nothing else on television."
"a phenomenon."
"A tangled tale of sex, violence, power, junk food..."
"Like Nothing On Earth"
~ WHAT THEY'RE TRYING TO SAY CAN ONLY BE SEEN ~
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHTUOgYNRzY
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