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Comment by entropicdrifter | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that in a couple of years this driver will become incredibly useful for low-end ARM boards. Manufacturers of cheap hardware will only need to get an open source Vulkan driver mainlined and suddenly the machine will be able to play virtually any game ever made because it will indirectly support OpenGL and every version of DirectX. Likewise it'll give WebGPU/WebGL support thanks to ANGLE.

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Isn't this the idea of Gallium3D (part of the MESA project)? You write one driver and have support for Vulkan, OpenGL, etc.

In terms of achieving a certain level of functionality, you can do that, but the additional abstraction you add into your software stack translates into poorer performance and additional complexity. It's a trade-off.

Source: worked on GPU drivers for over a decade and had to make decisions like that.

This may be a weird question and probably not your call but, since you work for Nvidia and you mentioned having worked on GPU drivers I would be curious to know something I have been wondering for a long while, namely 1) how come the Nvidia drivers for FreeBSD don’t support CUDA, and more importantly 2) what would it take for CUDA support in Nvidia drivers for FreeBSD to happen?

Apologies in advance if this is asking questions that you are not allowed to comment on.

I've never worked on drivers at NVidia, so on the one hand I don't know the answer, but I can speculate with an educated guess.

Porting, testing and providing ongoing support for an OS is very costly. If there's not enough customer demand for it, it won't be done because it doesn't make business sense.

Gallium's architecture of "state trackers" are sort of antithetical to the idea of Vulkan in many ways. Neither Intel's Vulkan driver, nor RADV, bother using it.

Gallium's 0.4 performance on my card is atrocious. I am using MESA 13.0.6 on libDRM 24.68, and yet even Flare is damn slow. On current, it's much better, but Google's Street View is still slow, albeit gaming on PPSSPP is fast and good.. AMD/ATi RS 690 with MESA 20, I tried it, but I went back. Go figure. Even Quake ports are barely accelerated under the old MESA/KMS combo...

And no, I am not using LLVMPIPE.

Vulkan drivers in Mesa aren't using Gallium3D, they are using NIR as intermediate representation though.

For example ACO (new shader compiler for radv and potentially radeonsi) complies NIR into AMD GCN / RDNA machine code.

> and every version of DirectX

Could you expand a bit on this? Are you referring to DXVK? Or does Zink have support for DirectX?

Seem to be referring to DXVK; and honestly, that’s pretty fair given how well it works. Zink + DXVK might end up being an impressive combo for simplifying the Linux graphics stack. A bit like what Gallium3D was trying to do, but the abstraction layer is exposed as its own standardized API.

dxvk only supports dx10/dx11, but vkd3d does dx12, d9vk does dx9, and wine itself does all versions. performance isn't great, but the compatibility definitely is.

dxvk also supports dx9

Performance is actually great, considering needed overhead.

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