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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

> They've been about getting code and data into GPUs as fast as reasonably possible. DevEx will always play second fiddle to that.

That's a tiny bit revisionist history. Each new major D3D version (at least before D3D12) also fixes usability warts compared to the previous version with D3D11 probably being the most convenient to use 3D API - while also giving excellent performance.

Metal also definitely has a healthy balance between convenience and low overhead - and more recent Metal versions are an excellent example that a high performance modern 3D API doesn't have to be hard to use, nor require thousands of lines of boilerplate to get a triangle on screen.

OTH, OpenGL has been on a steady usability downward trend since the end of the 1990s, and Vulkan unfortunately had continued this trend (but may steer into the right direction in the future:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM-SzTHAKGo

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I hear you but I also don't see a ton of disagreement here either. Like, the fact that D3D12 includes _some_ usability fixes suggests that DevEx really does take a back seat to the primary goal.

I'm not arguing that DevEx doesn't exist in graphics programming. Just that it's second to dots on screen. I also find webgpu to be a lot nicer in terms of DevEx than WebGL.

Wdyt? Still revisionist, or maybe just a slightly different framing of the same pov?

> I also find webgpu to be a lot nicer in terms of DevEx than WebGL.

Amen.

IMHO a new major and breaking D3D version is long overdue. There must be plenty of learnings in which areas it was actually worth it to sacrifice ease-of-use for peformance and where it wasn't.

Or maybe something completely radical/ridiculous and make HLSL the new "D3D API" (with some parts of HLSL code running on the CPU, just enough to prepare CPU side data for upload to the GPU).

I think that is where they are going with mesh shaders, amplification shaders and bringing more C++ into HLSL, but still as part of DirectX 12.

I don't imagine them pushing for a DirectX 13, only available on Windows 12 onwards kind of thing, as they have done in past.

Either way, I see we will be back to software rendering, although it is actually hardware accelerated.

> Metal also definitely has a healthy balance between convenience and low overhead - and more recent Metal versions are an excellent example that a high performance modern 3D API doesn't have to be hard to use, nor require thousands of lines of boilerplate to get a triangle on screen.

Metal 4 has moved a lot in the other direction, and now copies a lot of concepts from Vulkan.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/understandin...

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/resource-syn...

If only Vulkan SDK was half as good as Metal development experience, including IDE integration, proper support for managed languages, and graphical debugging and profiling experience.

That has been the main pain point of Khronos APIs, it isn't only the extension spaghetti, the first step is always to go fishing all the puzzle pieces to have a proper development experience.

At least now there is LunarG SDK, however for how long are they going to sponsor them, and it isn't applicable to Android, where Google does the minimum, a Github repo dump with samples and good luck.

Compare that with Apple Metal frameworks.

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