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.

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)

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

oh, update on my little vulkan compute project, last night I got as far as repeatedly dispatching an empty compute shader and allocating some memory 😎 I'm in the home stretch! I think I just need to figure out the resources / resource binding stuff and then I'll be able to start on my DSP experiment :3

which mostly means the next things are figuring out the least effort way of getting audio data into C++ (probably stb_vorbis?) and writing even more boilerplate for alsa...

I reworked it so the convolution shader processes the audio in tandem with playback, so I'm *very* close to getting this working with live audio streams.

But more importantly, I used this to convolve my song "strange birds" with a choir-ish fanfare sound effect from a game I used to play as a kid and the result is like the grand cosmos opened up before me and I'm awash in the radiant light of the universe. Absolutely incredible.

ok the problem I'm having with latency now is that the audio latency in the system grows over time and I'm not sure why. like it starts snappy and after running for a short while it gets super laggy :/

I'm guessing it's because SDL3 can and will resize buffers as it wants to, whereas I'd rather it just go crazy if it under runs.

What I want to do is have a fixed size buffer for input and output, enough that I can have the output double or tripple buffered to smooth over hitches caused by linux. if my program can't keep up I don't want it to quietly allocate more runway I want it to scream at me LOUDLY and HORRIBLY, but it wont do that because I'll rejigger my program until it is perfect.

What actually happens is (sdl? poopwire?) just infinitybuffers so it never hitches and I get a second of latency after a little bit

@aeva 🤔 my impression is that, if the layers outside of your code are dynamically growing in order to deal with some latency deadline not being met, you'd hear at least one glitch in the audio each time it has to grow. otherwise, how would it know the application/usage layer failed to fill the output audio buffer in time?

maybe something else is happening? which audio API are you using? it looks like SDL has multiple.

@cancel I believe SDL is using pipewire by default. If I set it to ALSA it prints an error but otherwise behaves the same, suggesting it falls back to pipewire. If I set it to jack it freezes.

FWIW I have also seen this behavior with pipewire.