Comment by jms55 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jms55 | Hacker News Reader

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> NVidia and AMD keep designing their cards with Microsoft for DirectX first, and Vulkan, eventually.

Not really. For instance NVIDIA released day 1 Vulkan extensions for their new raytracing and neural net tech (VK_NV_cluster_acceleration_structure, VK_NV_partitioned_tlas, VK_NV_cooperative_vector), as well as equivalent NVAPI extensions for DirectX12. Equal support, although DirectX12 is technically worse as you need to use NVAPI and rely on a prerelease version of DXC, as unlike Vulkan and SPIR-V, DirectX12 has no mechanism for vendor-specific extensions (for good or bad).

Meanwhile the APIs, both at a surface level and how the driver implements them under the hood, are basically identical. So identical in fact, that NVIDIA has the nvrhi project which provides a thin wrapper over Vulkan/DirectX12 so that you can run on multiple platforms via one API.

An exception that doesn't change the rule, where are the Vulkan extensions for DirectX neural shaders, and RTX kit?

As a more recent example, not feeling like enumerating all of them since DirectX 8 shader model introduction, and collaboration with NVidia where Cg became HLSL foundation.

Exactly, proprietary APIs don't have extension spaghetti like Khronos APIs, that always end up out of control, hence Vulkan 2025 roadmap plans.

Khronos got lucky that Google and Samsung decided to embrace Vulkan as the API to be on Android, Valve for their Steam Deck, and IoT displays, basically.

Everywhere else it is middleware engines that support all major 3D APIs, with WebGPU becoming also middleware outside of the browser due to the ways of Vulkan.

> An exception that doesn't change the rule, where are the Vulkan extensions for DirectX neural shaders, and RTX kit?

DirectX "neural shaders" is literately the VK_NV_cooperative_vector extension I mentioned previously, which is actually easier to use in Vulkan at the moment since you don't need a custom prelease version of DXC. Same for all the RTX kit stuff, e.g. https://github.com/NVIDIA-RTX/RTXGI has both VK and DX12 support.

And how does that prove that NVidia has not designed that together with Microsoft first in DirectX prototype?

Additionally, naturally Intel and AMD will come up with their extensions, if ever, followed by a Khronos common one. Not counting mobile units into this extension frenzy.

So then we will have the pleasure to chose between four extensions for a feature, depending on the card's vendor, with possible incompatible semantics, as it has happened so many times.

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