Hacker News Reader

Comment by iforgotpassword | Hacker News Reader

> All of these HW stages (except GS, of course)

...Of course...

The intro was pretty rough, it expects a lot of knowledge about the topic. I almost stopped reading there. The second part that explains the possibilities and talks about real world performance impact was pretty interesting though, so, glad I kept reading.

View on HN

It'd be nice if it explained the acronyms the first time they are used.

They link to a doc that has a glossary[1] but you're not wrong, it would be helpful.

1: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/main/src/amd...

Even knowing what they all are it’s annoying to read compared to having them spelled out. I’m constantly pausing to translate. If you’re talking to someone IRL you just say “hardware vertex shader,” not “HW VS”.

Yeah, I know all these terms, but I only learned them from working on the PS4 for a long time. Even those quite familiar with graphics might struggle to read this article.

GS = geometry shader, and it's main gimmick is allowing you to generate triangle topology on the GPU. So that's why it should be "obvious" that a GS lane can control more than one output vertex. GS was also a terrible idea, because it's slow.

Hey, geometry shaders can be awesome but they do have limited use. I guess it might fall out of favor if we end up with Nanite taking over.

Them falling out of favor has nothing to do with nanite FYI, and you would not want to use GS for any of the benefits a tech like nanite gives you because it's far too slow. We've all moved to CS for that sort of things if you can't rely on AS/MS

Reply on news.ycombinator.com