swiftshader VS angle

Is it really true that those bugs aren't getting fixed? There's a commit from July 18th to SwiftShader that seems to be addressing exactly the bug described in the blog post:

https://github.com/google/swiftshader/commit/4e401427f8dd799...

If your GPU does not support Vulkan you can still do some experimenting with a CPU renderer. I've used swiftshader a lot, it's a bit of a pain to compile, but once you manage to do so you can compile and run Vulkan code almost the same as if you had a compatible GPU. The performance of course is not great, but it's better than nothing.

swiftshader by Google (link):

You also don't get extensive support for various hardware for free – good luck running a Vulkan GUI on a pre-GCN AMD card or a sufficiently old NVIDIA one without a compatibility layer of sorts, which would require bothering with Vulkan Portability (i.e. missing certain Vulkan features due to it being implemented via an older API). The only alternative to that is SwiftShader (which would throw your extremely fast GUI aspirations right outta the window).

That's like saying no one needs a GPU anymore because Swiftshader exists.

Btw, if anyone's interested, here's the link to that branch: https://github.com/google/swiftshader/tree/legacy-d3d9

Yeah, there's still a fallback option through the use of Swiftshader if GPU accelerated vulkan isn't an option. If you use Vulkan for GUI, then it'll be fine to use Swiftshader, but if you're trying to play a game on Swiftshader, it'll likely struggle and probably fail.

The fix is https://github.com/flutter/engine/pull/25205 to use soft renderer SwiftShader instead of DXD9 on low-end PCs

Google’s version is SwiftShader

It's using MoltenVK on Mac for Vulkan compatibility, and ANGLE for OpenGL compatibility on Windows and Linux. Makes you wonder what it's actually doing itself.

Can't they use https://github.com/google/angle?

BTW. For the last 15 years, all web browsers on Windows do WebGL on top of DirectX (using the Angle library https://github.com/google/angle).

You can still use OpenGL. Just not the vendor provided drivers. They are indeed horrible. There are libraries like:

* ANGLE ( https://github.com/google/angle ) - An OpenGL ES implementation with Direct3D 9, Direct3D 11, Desktop GL, GL ES, Vulkan and Metal backends. This is what we used to use for shipping our Qt 3D application, that used a bunch of OpenGL Shaders. We used to get bug reports about various shaders not working properly on various hardware. After switching to this, all those bug reports vanished.

* Zinc ( https://www.supergoodcode.com/do-not/ ) - A more recent, OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan. I haven't used this one yet. But they are making a lot of progress and it is almost as performant as vendor provided OpenGL Drivers these days. So if I ever have to ship a desktop app, needing opengl, I'd strongly consider using this.

Another option if perf isn't a big concern is to try using Google's angle OpenGL ES 3.0 implementation, there's backends for it to be supported on Vulkan, Direct3D 11, and (work in progress) Metal. Disclosure, haven't tried it myself, just looking at their feature descriptions: https://github.com/google/angle

I don't believe Chrome uses OpenGL directly- any OpenGL usage it does have (e.g. for WebGL) is actually going through ANGLE which translates it all to D3D on Windows.

RTFM, have you read their instruction