CODEWITHSUNDEEP
openglgraphicsdirectx
Jebathon
Jebathon

Reputation: 4561

Can understanding the low-level intricacies of a GPU/core-drivers develop your skill with working with Graphic APIs?

e.g. If I learn the low-level Graphics Pipeline, take a trip on learning the ARB assembly language and understand the logic for certain gpu device driver calls can it help me enhance my knowledge in GPU API programming or is there no correlation whatsover and will I be only wasting my time?

EDIT: Do professionals need to understand this to a degree?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 161

Answers (3)

Andon M. Coleman
Andon M. Coleman

Reputation: 43319

ARB assembly language?

   No.

You do not need to know that, though many professionals already do as a consequence of being in the industry before GLSL or Cg existed. To be honest, I cannot say that I feel any better off having experience with the ARB assembly language, all of the same concepts are taught in GLSL. And many of the hardware restrictions that applied to ARB FP/VP are no longer valid.

You would probably be doing yourself a disservice by learning it, like learning immediate mode or the fixed-function pipeline, it simply is not relevant to modern hardware/software.

That said, the blog you linked to is a very good thing to read. Do not concern yourself with hardware instruction sets (even the ARB languages are actually a virtual instruction set, translated by the driver later into the hardware's native ISA). Instead, you should understand the pipeline itself.

A high-level overview of the pipeline will do you better in the long-run. Underlying hardware optimization techniques change with each generation, but the fundamental stages of the pipeline remain relatively static (of course new programmable stages are periodically introduced). If you understand the pipeline from a high-level, then you will be prepared to learn about and apply new hardware features as they are introduced.

Upvotes: 2

redsoxfantom
redsoxfantom

Reputation: 956

Its definitely a good idea to have a solid understanding of what makes a GPU tick. If you know your card at a deep level, than you can easily identify bottlenecks and get maximum performance. The trouble is, finding up to date information is pretty difficult, unless you go straight to the manufacturers, and they obviously won't tell you everything about how their card works.

That link you posted is a really helpful primer, I've read it myself, but take note of the date. It was posted in 2011, which means it is almost 3 years out of date now. In the GPU world, 3 years might as well be a lifetime.

Here's a few links to nvidia and AMD's developer sites, you would probably find good information there.

http://developer.amd.com/

https://developer.nvidia.com/

Upvotes: 3

nielsj
nielsj

Reputation: 1507

Not if you 're going to dive in to some obscure chip, but it most certainly helps to understand the basics of the hardware you're trying to control. I've done some console renderer programming in the past that was pretty much on the metal and that has positively influenced higher-level API usage.

Upvotes: 1

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