Modern Computer Graphics

• There are two main parts of Modern Computer Graphics i have found so far:

  • Render Calls or also Command Chains (computer graphics)
  • Buffer Management and Allocation (computer graphics)
  • Shaders and the Computer Graphics pipeline
    • Shader Languages

• WTF is Gallium (computer graphics) again????????????

• Learning Modern Computer Graphics by Doing

• going deep again for linux enable unused monitor output - virtual monitor … https://discord.com/channels/1145943673826181174/1160658330453282859/1391078562546581634

  • next to understand… how do those BatchBuffers work… do they exist everywhere or just on i915 (intel-gpu-driver)…
    • also where are the compilers… can i pkg them in a way, where you can play around with them???

• next thing to research for me:

  • opengl internals, how do we go from func like “draw a line” to info being transmitted to the gpu on how to fill a pixel buffer, what even is this info (vertexes????), how does opengl use shaders???
    • see: OpenGL and Render Calls
  • how to mmap a buffer that is on a device connected via pcie, usb, spi, …
    • see: Memory Mapping
  • finding a “Vulcan Loader” … Running cogentcore on Nix

things

• Tessellation: https://youtu.be/YGhfy3om9Ok?si=kf6YWfci-NwznKtQ&t=530
• “do stuff like: take this image/buffer, that was used in OpenGL and transition it be used for video encoding” to then send it out a network Socket for streaming to another host
  • https://www.youtube.com/live/4PflCyiULO4?si=YewahDingTO7XyUF&t=27831
  • that sounds an awful amount like the reason for Wayland Screenshot/Screenshare problems
• Arbitration
• this guy knows his stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ov9GhEV3eE
  • and just like me in my area talks about ppl not knowing, what’s possible
• Rendering Text
• with my 4k monitor conneted the Xserver (of host main at https://github.com/c2vi/nixos/commit/cfd9bfccbd25099d87f92d4c467e815f0b099dd5) is at a constant 20% CPU on my hp elitebook laptop with i5-1135G7
  • i think smth is not fully using the GPU here…
• Mesa (computer graphics)
• “people use SDL 2 as a glorified OpenGL initializer… and then just uses OpenGL” - Tscoding daily … https://youtu.be/PuE98lipGU8?si=jba3NVdc-ML0t648&t=95
• 150 lines for a basic triangle with SDL_GPU api: https://youtu.be/PuE98lipGU8?si=nC5sSamowRpF16yS&t=4990
  • aparently with Vulkan or OpenGL smth like this takes thousands of lines…
• for moderns graphics apis you have: Command Chains (computer graphics) and Swap Buffers (computer graphics) … https://youtu.be/PuE98lipGU8?si=cv8h7R980EmG4m2D&t=5710
• Running Desktop Games on Android…
• there are IOCTL = Input Output Controls like DRM_IOCTL_I915_GEM_EXECBUFFER2… meaning the userspace (OpenGL, Vulkan (graphics)… in the Mesa (computer graphics) codebase) must be aware of the different gpu types available… and have seperate drivers for that…
  • the intel Vulkan driver is in Mesa (computer graphics)
  • the AMD = Advanced Micro Devices driver is here: https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK
    • this uses the repo (AOSP) tool, to actually download the code from multiple repos…

some useful resources

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8OY4VtYx1s
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5hw5Nisd8k
• raw doging linux graphics
• basic guide to debugging OpenGL: https://youtu.be/BnXnUjPku84?si=5QCF51TriIL0mkMp
• quick extensible OpenGL renderer: https://youtu.be/NPnQF4yABwg?si=im9A5wDvZperWfCW
• the Linux GPU driver docs are actually quite good: https://docs.kernel.org/gpu/

concepts

• X Window System
• GBM = Generic Buffer Management
• DRM = Direct Rendering Manager
• OpenGL
• Vulkan (graphics)
• DirectX
• Gralloc
• EGL
• EGLStreams API
• Video encoding formats