Tbh, we should more readily abandon GPU vendors that refuse to go with the times. If we cater to them for too long, they have no reason to adapt.
So I was sad not to be able to run a text editor (let's be honest, Zed is nice but it's just displaying text). And somehow the non-accelerated version is eating 24 cores. Just for text.
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/discussions/23623
I ended up buying a new graphics card in the end.
I just wish everyone could get along somehow.
Sublime Text spent over a decade tuning their CPU renderer and it still didn't cut it at high resolutions.
https://www.sublimetext.com/blog/articles/hardware-accelerat...
Now, the situation is that your display is directly attached to a humongously overpowered beefcake of a coprocessor (the GPU), which is hyper-optimized for calculating pixel stuff, and it can do it orders of magnitude faster than you can tell it manually how to update even a single pixel.
Not using it is silly when you look at it that way.
But look at my CPU charts in the github link upthread. I understand that maybe that's due to the CPU emulating a GPU? But from a thousand feet, that's not viable for a text editor.
(Finger in the air, I'd expect an editor to work on 20 year old hardware.)
Sold it ages ago. New one (Intel) works fine.
I was running Ubuntu. I forget which version.
That's pretty old, the actual architecture debuted in 2012 and Nvidia stopped supporting the official drivers in 2021. Technically it did barely support Vulkan, but with that much legacy baggage it's not really surprising that greenfield Vulkan software doesn't work on it. In any case you should be set for a long time with that new Intel card.
I get where you're coming from that it's just a text editor, but on the other hand what they're doing is optimal for most of their users, and it would be a lot of extra work to also support the long tail of hardware which is almost old enough to vote.
My hope was that they would find a higher-level place to modularize the render than llvmpipe, although I agree that was unreasonable technical choice.
Once-in-a-generation technology cliff-edges have to happen. Hopefully not too often. It's just not pleasant being caught on the wrong side of the cliff!
Thanks for the insights.
This was so much more practical before the market coalesced to just 3 players. Matrox, it's time for your comeback arc! and maybe a desktop pcie packaging for mali?
ARM makes their Mali line, which vendors like Mediatek license and puts straight on their chips.
Qualcomm makes their custom Adreno gpus. (Derived from Radeon Mobile). They won't sell it outside snapdragon.
Samsung again licensed Mali from ARM, but in their flagship exynos's they use AMD's gpus. They won't sell it outside exynos.
PowerVR makes gpus that are so outdated with features that Pixel 10 phones can't even run some benchmarks.
And then there's apple.
What does help is an industry accepted benchmark, easily ran by everyone. I remember browser css being all over the place, until that whatsitsname benchmark (with the smiley face) demonstrated which emperors had no clothes. Everyone could surf to the test and check how well their favorite browser did. Scores went up quickly, and today, css is in a lot better shape.