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Comment by lux | Hacker News Reader

Looking at this, along with using all of Unity or Unreal's engine, make me think of the saying "standing on the shoulders of giants". I usually think of that more in an open source context, but the layers of abstraction that go into any area of modern computing are mindblowing at times. Humans are nuts.

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Graphics are nuts. I did a lot of research months ago into how to build my own CPU, RAM, OS etc. from the ground up. I was able to figure out how a bunch of things worked that I didn't know before, and overall feel pretty confident in understanding at least a high level overview of a modern x86 computer.

I never figured out graphics cards. They are absurdly powerful and absurdly complex. The lack of documentation and open source drivers also does not help. As featured on HN a bit ago, AMD's drivers for Linux make up 10+% of the entire kernel codebase now!

I have no idea how the developers at Unity or Unreal stay sane. The amount of work that has gone into these base platforms we all take advantage of is...unreal.

A well-written GPU driver is a complete copy of an entire OS stack — inverted around the kernel driver. It's going to have at least one Unix-like OS (FW driver), a compiler, a driver-stack, network protocols, etc. I think of a GPU (and its SW stack) like Quade.

I don’t know about 3D graphics, but this article shows how to a graphics accelerator for 2D sprites.

https://andybrown.me.uk/wk/2014/06/01/ase/

At a high level it showcases the idea of offloading expensive graphics computations to a separate chip. A modern window manager uses the graphics device in a similar way to avoid redrawing the contents of windows as you move them around the screen.

This is also a good series of articles to understand how a GPU works: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2011/07/09/a-trip-through-the-...

I think at this point a GPU card is more like a second computer inside your computer. I wonder if we could get rid of the regular computer and use a GPU only... are there any OS for a GPUs?

Yet AMD's driver support is hilariously awful. I spent four hours yesterday trying to install the Pro drivers for a 6700xt on ubuntu 20.04 using the official drivers. No luck.

Nvidia drivers may be closed source, but it just works.

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