NVIDIA,AMD and Intel explain how OpenGL can unlock 15x Performance Gains

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*www.opengl.org/img/opengl_logo.jpg

Nvidia, AMD and Intel explain the power of opengl to reduce driver overhead at GDC 2014

If you want to get a developer’s attention, all you need to do is start dropping whole numbers.

Offer something that’s not 1.2 times better — but two or three times better — you know you’ve got them.

That’s the good news we teamed up with AMD and Intel to deliver at this week’s Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco.

AMD’s Graham Sellers, Intel’s Tim Foley, and our own Cass Everitt and John McDonald appeared on the same panel to explain the high-level concepts available in today’s OpenGL implementations that reduce driver overhead by up to 10x or more.

With OpenGL, an open, vendor-neutral standard, developers can get significantly better performance – up to 1.3 times. But with a little tuning, they can get 7 to 15 times more performance.

That’s a figure that will make any developer sit up and listen.

Better still: the techniques presented apply to all major vendors and are suitable for use across multiple platforms. And they brought demos, showing what these improvements mean on real world systems.

That’s because OpenGL can cut through the driver overhead that has been a frustrating reality for game developers since the beginning of the PC game industry.

On desktop systems, driver overhead can decrease frame rate. On mobile devices, however, driver overhead is even more insidious, robbing both battery life and frame rate.

Approaching zero driver overhead

Source:Nvidia Blog

DirectX will soon implement something similar. But since the number of platforms for serious gaming are rising and as most of them use openGL, DirectX may die off in the coming years. BTW the stuff said in that video is for hardcore programmers. Can't really understand much.

After a long time things are going in right direction .. I'm just wondering if we can gain 15x performance what all those top of the line high end gpus will do ?

topgear said:
After a long time things are going in right direction .. I'm just wondering if we can gain 15x performance what all those top of the line high end gpus will do ?

600 Hz?

Rehab next day

^^ explain a little.

Microsoft was to reveal DirectX 12 during GDC too, any news on what they had to say?

Well as far as mobile games go, I haven't seen any massive performance gain with OpenGL(not 15 times), not sure how much of it is Theoretical

tkin said:
Well as far as mobile games go, I haven't seen any massive performance gain with OpenGL(not 15 times), not sure how much of it is Theoretical

I think such a assumption is completely theoretical since the performance of mobile games are highly dependent on the current hardware level of the phones, which is not really capable of performing well and keeping the battery consumption nominal.

In order to get a performance boost by a huge margin, you first need a device that can perform better and/or an application that is heavily not well optimized. Even on optimization, I don't think you can get a 15 times performance gain. Only better and power efficient hardware could make this possible.

The best part about this is that Intel, AMD and Nvidia are did this together. #respect

tkin said:
Well as far as mobile games go, I haven't seen any massive performance gain with OpenGL(not 15 times), not sure how much of it is Theoretical

Android platform will have relatively lower performance when compared to iphones since there is a significant difference in hardware configuration from phone to phone. There is a lot of abstraction to be done on the OS side. Since there is only a limited number of 'mutually hardware-ly' different iphones the developers can write separate code for each device. No abstraction is needed and hence the code performs better. Maybe once the mentioned technology is implemented android's performance will improve. Iphones won't benefit much from this.

Neuron said:
Android platform will have relatively lower performance when compared to iphones since there is a significant difference in hardware configuration from phone to phone. There is a lot of abstraction to be done on the OS side. Since there is only a limited number of 'mutually hardware-ly' different iphones the developers can write separate code for each device. No abstraction is needed and hence the code performs better. Maybe once the mentioned technology is implemented android's performance will improve. Iphones won't benefit much from this.

That's partly true, but even iphones will have abstraction, albeit the drivers will have better optimization, otherwise a game crash will crash the entire OS.

tkin said:
That's partly true, but even iphones will have abstraction, albeit the drivers will have better optimization, otherwise a game crash will crash the entire OS.

I was wrong to say that no abstraction was needed. Abstraction is needed but it's not as complex as that of android. But iphones won't get much improvement on performance since iphone apps are pretty decently optimized by the developing environment itself.

S

^^^I think it is more that the testing platform of iOS is easier - a certain minimum criteria (say iPad 2 or iPhone 4) can be checked. If it satisfies the minimum, it will run better on higher models. Same cannot be said for Android as there is a huge mix in the configs available (mix and match of RAM, chip, OS version, brand UI, etc) so minimum criteria cannot be specified easily. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Arun

sakumar79 said:
^^^I think it is more that the testing platform of iOS is easier - a certain minimum criteria (say iPad 2 or iPhone 4) can be checked. If it satisfies the minimum, it will run better on higher models. Same cannot be said for Android as there is a huge mix in the configs available (mix and match of RAM, chip, OS version, brand UI, etc) so minimum criteria cannot be specified easily. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Arun

It will be similar to what DX12 is promising, a driver+framework(mostly) level optimization which decreases abstraction, just like how sound card could be accessed in XP.

I don't even care if it will be 15 times or 2 times. I just want that games should now start implementing OpenGL instead of blindly following DirectX lead.

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I have a doubt , does Sony PS4 uses Opengl for games it runs?

gopi_vbboy said:
I have a doubt , does Sony PS4 uses Opengl for games it runs?

It uses libGCM which is partly based on OpenGL. So yes.

gopi_vbboy said:
I have a doubt , does Sony PS4 uses Opengl for games it runs?

I think they use a modified version of OpenGL, since I read somewhere its using a custom FreeBSD OS.

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Neuron said:
It uses libGCM which is partly based on OpenGL. So yes.

I thought PS4 ditched libGCM.

tkin said:
I thought PS4 ditched libGCM.

Turns out they have. PS4 uses a new set of libraries called GNM and GNMX which is a wrapper library to GNM. AFAIK they have nothing to do with OpenGL.

Neuron said:
Turns out they have. PS4 uses a new set of libraries called GNM and GNMX which is a wrapper library to GNM. AFAIK they have nothing to do with OpenGL.

That's a bold decision, its hard to believe they created a complete 3d API from ground up, very difficult to do and nobody had tried it in the past 10 years.

tkin said:
That's a bold decision, its hard to believe they created a complete 3d API from ground up, very difficult to do and nobody had tried it in the past 10 years.

They probably built it on top of libGCM and removed the OpenGL dependency.