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Aras Pranckevičius

@mcc Khronos discussions are basically *a lot* of conference calls and occasional face to face meetings, a lot of "voting" and tracking "who can vote" based on attendance, and a lot of writing proposals in weird dialect of English that is "spec language". Who wants to do that, and who has time to do that?

One possible, I'm sure hypothetical scenario: someone who's not terribly busy working on the engine itself. Heck, maybe if they spent their time on calls they'd cause less damage to the code!

6 comments
Aras Pranckevičius

@mcc (this is 900% exaggerated, but there's a grain of truth)

And so you *can* end up in a situation where company's representatives on Khronos do not *necessarily* voice company's opinions or wishes. They are just *there*, saying whatever they want to say; they aren't quite aware of what the engine needs or wants, and vice versa the engine is not quite aware of what they are saying. A gross oversight from "management" I guess.

Aras Pranckevičius

@mcc And then you also get nuggets like company CEO going onto google IO keynote and promising the engine will ship Vulkan support in "like 3 months", and that's *totally news* to people working on the engine since everyone there is "it's gonna take 3 years to get into a design that suits vulkan". Why would a CEO do that? Because another engine did it, and it's a pissing match between CEOs or something.

Aras Pranckevičius

@mcc and then you mix in some pride and hubris and arrogance, like "hey all the cool kids are doing this mantle-like renderer design, who are we to not able to pull this off?", and you start nodding along at the conferences and proudly saying how it's all gonna be cool & cozy.

Tom Forsyth

@aras @mcc My recollections are that it was:

ISVs: we hate that drivers are doing all this stuff behind our backs.

IHVs: well we have to if the API is going to be usable.

ISVs: how about if we do all that work instead?

IHVs: ooooh - be careful what you wish for. I mean here's Mantle, look at all that crap you have to do.

ISVs: that looks awesome - we're software people, we can handle it.

IHVs: <washes hands> Ctrl+H, "mt", "vk", <yes to all>

Aras Pranckevičius

@TomF @mcc Right yeah, and my point is that this "ISVs" is an extremely small subset of "all ISVs", the ones who either really want it, or the ones who think they want it, but their opinion does not even reflect their company's or their coworkers' opinion.

Scott Michaud

@TomF @aras @mcc Also, from my (outside) perspective, it looked like NVIDIA was pouring money into driver optimizations. AMD was getting frustrated that Microsoft was (apparently) completely uninterested in updating DX11, and they couldn't keep up with NVIDIA's "Game Ready" treadmill, so they pushed Mantle (likely intending to donate it from the get-go).

(Roy Taylor saying no DX12 ~5-6 months before Mantle was announced)
megaleecher.net/directx_12

@TomF @aras @mcc Also, from my (outside) perspective, it looked like NVIDIA was pouring money into driver optimizations. AMD was getting frustrated that Microsoft was (apparently) completely uninterested in updating DX11, and they couldn't keep up with NVIDIA's "Game Ready" treadmill, so they pushed Mantle (likely intending to donate it from the get-go).

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