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by raphlinus·1y ago·view on hn ↗
We tried something like this with piet-gpu-hal. One problem is that spirv-cross is lossy, though gaps in target language support are getting better. For example, a device scoped barrier is just dropped on the floor before Metal 3.2. Atomics are also a source of friction.

But the main problem is not the shader language itself, but the binding model. It's a pretty big mess, and things change as you go in the direction of bindless (descriptor indexing). There are a few approaches to this, certainly reinventing WebGPU is one. Another intriguing approach is blade[1] by Dzmitry Malyshau.

I wish the authors well, but this is a hard road, especially if the goal is to enable more advanced features including compute.

[1]: https://github.com/kvark/blade

2 comments
I’d very much like to read about Blade, but seems like they have literally no documentation in text format, not even a basic introduction. Every link on the GitHub page goes to YouTube.

Project authors, please don’t do this. It’s impossible to get a two-minute overview from a video. Browsing through tutorials and documentation is much more efficient.

If you really have never written anything about the project except conference slides, then at least put up that deck in addition to the YouTube link. Clicking through slides is not great, but it’s still a better browsing experience than seeking at random in a video.

As expected, they don't touch the issue of how shaders work in PlayStation (LibGNM, LibGNMX) and Switch (NVN).
I really do wish that Sony made even more info about GNM and GNMX public. I was only starting to learn it when I got laid off and lost my access. I may or may not still have some older docs that found their way into my box as I was leaving on the last day, but if any did, they're definitely incomplete. I spent most of my time working on non-graphics parts of the project, so my time that I got to spend on digging into graphics system of the PS5 was pretty limited.
These systems are highly proprietary and Inam reasonably certain that stating anything about them publicly would break some NDAs.
As someone still having an Nintendo Developer Portal account, holding SCEE content back when the London Soho office used to have a developer site (aka Team Soho), and PS2Linux owner, there is plenty of material that can be discussed publicly without breaking NDAs.
Console specific information also is not all that interesting anymore these days since game consoles have switched to off-the-shelf GPU designs with only minor modifications.
Even the current generation of consoles still have some interesting stuff going on. The 'core' of the console is fairly off the shelf, but they do still have modifications specific to the console that you won't find elsewhere. As far as GPU stuff goes, they tend to provide somewhat lower-level access to the hardware that you would normally not get with consumer stuff.
Yeah, but they still use their own proprietary APIs.