Comment by whatevsmate
9 days ago
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.