> Vulkan and OpenGL both already support mesh shaders, which is a compute-oriented alternative to the traditional rasterization pipeline.
Mesh shaders are a step in the right direction, but they are still embedded in all that unnecessary Vulkan fluff. I would want these things in CUDA because it does the opposite approach of Vulkan - it makes the common things easy, and the hard/powerful things optional. Just let me draw things directly in CUDA, and maybe give access to the hardware rasterizer via a CUDA call.
Yes, sorry for the confusion. I'd just rather have an API where the common things are easy, and the super powerful low-level optimizations are optional.
except the easy common things are very slow, and the optimizations which are basically required become a careful dance of understanding the underlying hardware interface anyway (without any real documentation) and figuring out how to map that onto the high-level interface.
What happened is that Khronos Group banked on third parties writing OpenGL-esque "middleware libraries" that bridged the gap between the hopelessly complex Vulkan API and people who want to write simple 3D graphics. Unfortunately, Khronos learnt the hard way that you can't just expect people to do work for you without a sufficient incentive, since after all, OpenGL still exists for anyone who wishes to have an easy API for graphics programming, and anyone who doesn't want to do that just uses an engine or high-level graphics API.
Of course I'm not saying that these libraries don't exist, but they haven't taken off in the way they expected
You could always just use a library that simplifies Vulkan or keep some skeleton apps around. When you're past all of the verbose set up, the actual meat of it isn't too bad.
* ... a compute-oriented continuation of the practice where they take the average of Nvidia and AMD's implementations, and then force the developer to deal with the overhead of harmonizing the details without going insane.
GPU compute is awful, almost as bad as GPU rendering.
Overstatement of the year award candidate.
Vulkan and OpenGL both already support mesh shaders, which is a compute-oriented alternative to the traditional rasterization pipeline.