aevaMar 9, 2025
if you think about it, vulkan logical device implies the existence of vulkan illogical device
Show threadaevaMar 9, 2025

I'm slowly working through the vulkan spec writing a compute-only vulkan program from scratch that doesn't render anything, and it's going pretty well because the spec is really well written and I already know more or less exactly what I want to do anyway, but I just want to say just how silly (fun) it feels to write a program like this because you get to just skip over large swaths of the API.

Like, I'm working from the spec because the tutorials all make it more complicated.

Show threadaevaMar 9, 2025
also the tutorials I reviewed all did the annoying thing where the tutorial squirrels away the stuff you're trying to learn or reference into abstractions that only serve the needs of the tutorial writer, which given my goal is very specifically to *not draw anything*, there's really not much of a point to any of them lol. I'm really not the intended audience here though :3
Show threadaevaMar 10, 2025

I think it's cute that practically every vulkan command has one or more optional args to let you enter Hard Mode

(sorry for the double post, I added this to the wrong thread)

Show threadaevaMar 10, 2025
ok even with just the compute-only subset vulkan is a slog D:
Show threadaevaMar 10, 2025

I wonder how many people have actually managed to knuckle down and write a complete, useful vulkan program from scratch (no copy pasting from tutorials and stack overflow, no offloading significant parts to 3rd party libraries like VMA)

To think if I power through and get this thing working I could potentially be like the 20th person to bother

Show threadd@nny disc@ mc²Mar 10, 2025
@aeva who is vulkan made by/for? is it architected by like the chip designers without input from users?
Show threadaevaMar 10, 2025
@hipsterelectron it's an industry standards body of hardware and software vendors. Vulkan started off as a proprietary low level hardware API called Mantle which AMD donated to the Khronos group. This did meet a need at, because specialized game engines can make use of APIs like this to minimize driver overhead among other things. Before Vulkan you could only really do that with proprietary game console rendering APIs.
Show threadaeva

@hipsterelectron the downside though is it's exquisitely verbose and filled to the brim with footguns that are not likely to be obvious without some kind of relevant experience.

The situation is a bit better now because there's a number of great high quality libraries for doing various common tasks that compose well with one another, but I don't think we're quite at the point where it can fill all of OpenGL's niches yet.

Mar 10, 2025 at 4:36amWeb
Show threadPaul LalondeMar 10, 2025

@aeva it's also so verbose to please the hakf dozen IHVs who all have different underlying models.

I miss OpenGL ES.