Top all-time · #13256
gfxstrand.net
Personal blog · gfxstrand.net/faith/blogsystemsprogramming
gfxstrand.net is a personal blog at gfxstrand.net about systems and programming. Since 2023, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 8 times. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Faith Ekstrand's blog for graphics writing, especially her 'descriptors are hard' post on Vulkan and D3D12 descriptor binding, and for Wayland and GPU compiler topics.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /faith/blog/2022/08/descriptors-are-hard/3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-04-06
What Hacker News says?
ChromeOS VMs use Wayland over VirtIO for the GUI. Quick search tells me at least some people think Android has made design choices that are difficult to use Wayland with. Anyone know better? https://www.gfxstrand.net/faith/projects/wayland/wayland-and...
Comment linking /faith/projects/wayland/wayland-android/
on “ChromeOS will soon be developed on large portions of the Android stack”Submitted Does subgroup/wave size matter? as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI say this because vulkan is hamstrung by being an "open API" intended to run on a very wide range of devices including mobiles. this has major repercussions, like the awkward descriptor set binding model (whereas d3d12's descriptor heaps are both easier to deal with and map better to the actual hardware that d3d12 is intended to run on, see e.g. https://www.gfxstrand.net/faith/blog/2022/08/descriptors-are... ). ove…
Comment linking /faith/blog/2022/08/descriptors-are-hard/
on “DirectX Adopting SPIR-V as the Interchange Format of the Future”If you want something interesting on that topic, here's a fantastic explanation of one complex part of modern graphics hardware and how it varies across vendors https://www.gfxstrand.net/faith/blog/2022/08/descriptors-are...
Comment linking /faith/blog/2022/08/descriptors-are-hard/
on “The VGA Attribute Controller Is Weird”Faith Ekstrand has an impressive track record of compiler work and has written a few blog posts[1], [1a]. Her Mastodon[2] is also worth a follow. SPIR-V is important in the compute shader space, especially because DXIL and Metal's AIR are similar. I'm going to link three articles critical of SPIR-V: [3], [4], [5]. WebGPU [6] is interesting for a number of reasons, largely because they're trying to actually nail down…
Comment linking /faith/blog/
on “Ask HN: Resources for GPU Compilers?”I don't think all that much has changed except for the addition of meshlet and raytracing stages: The 'descriptors are hard' article is a nice modern compagnion IMHO: https://www.gfxstrand.net/faith/blog/2022/08/descriptors-are... Also the D3D12 functional spec might be useful too: https://microsoft.github.io/DirectX-Specs/
Comment linking /faith/blog/2022/08/descriptors-are-hard/
on “A trip through the Graphics Pipeline (2011)”> GPUs, from my understanding, have lost the majority of fixed-function units as they’ve become more programmable. That would be nice but doesn't match reality unfortunately, there are even new fixed-fuction units added from time to time (e.g. for raytracing). Texture sampling units also seem to be critical for performance and probably won't go away for a while. It should be possible to hide a lot of the fixed-funct…
Comment linking /faith/blog/2022/08/descriptors-are-hard/
on “Simplifying Vulkan One Subsystem at a Time”These are good posts to answer your question I think: - https://www.yosoygames.com.ar/wp/2023/04/vulkan-why-faq/ - https://www.gfxstrand.net/faith/blog/2022/08/descriptors-are... In places where Vulkan feels unnecessarily restrictive, the reason is mostly one or another mobile GPUs which still have a lot of hardwired expectations about how incoming data should be structured. AFAIK it's mostly not about tiled rendere…
Comment linking /faith/blog/2022/08/descriptors-are-hard/
on “Chrome Ships WebGPU”
