7
votes
Accepted
What mechanisms are being used by Directx12 and Vulkan APIs in order to communicate with graphic card drivers internally?
It's very different between the Khronos standards (including Vulkan) and DirectX.
In DirectX, Microsoft implements the API, but they publish to GPU vendors a HAL API. There's actually two HALs: one ...
- 6,880
7
votes
Accepted
Why do Nvidia and AMD have to update their drivers for game releases?
Games, Triple A games in particular, tend to push graphics cards to their limits, computation capabilities, bandwidth, and drivers all get stressed heavily. This tends to cause even the smallest bug, ...
- 3,484
6
votes
Accepted
Colorblending shader recompilation scenarios
In GL's model of the GPU, the colour blending step is performed by special-purpose hardware. This idea dates back to the fixed-function origins of GL, before programmable shaders were even a thing.
...
- 6,880
5
votes
Accepted
In what scenarios and how does GL_ARB_buffer_storage help performance?
The marquee feature of buffer storage is not immutability of the allocation itself, but instead is a feature you couldn't have without immutable allocation: persistently mapped buffers.
Pre-...
- 9,997
3
votes
Accepted
Why isn't multi-gpu handled by the driver?
Your assumption is wrong
It actually was this way, in fact, things have changed the other direction.
History
Currently (pre nvidia link consumer graphics) you've got to copy the memory over from ...
- 280
3
votes
Accepted
What is the difference and/or relationship between the OpenGL SDK and the OpenGL GPU driver?
I wouldn't really call it OpenGL SDK but OpenGL API. There's a common OpenGL API which is basically a set of functions you can call to control the GPU. This API is hardware agnostic (barring ...
- 3,686
2
votes
Accepted
What is in a GPU driver?
Your taxonomy is at best imprecise. A more accurate taxonomy would be:
Userland code. This is code that's executed by the CPU in user mode.
Driver code. This is code that's executed on the CPU which ...
- 9,997
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