[MPlayer-dev-eng] vulkan video output

[wm4]

On Sun, 4 Mar 2018 10:35:42 +0200
Lauri Kasanen <cand at gmx.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 1 Mar 2018 15:36:59 +0000
> sylvain.bertrand at gmail.com wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Any work in progress on a vulkan video output?  
> 
> What would be the use of one? Vulkan was made to lower cpu usage on
> lots of drawcalls and transfers. A media player does one drawcall and
> uses very simple fragment shaders - it does not benefit from vulkan.
> 
> It does not run on more platforms either, vulkan requires much more
> complex hardware than gl/gles.

Actually, Vulkan drivers are less complex than GL(ES) ones (or at least
that was the intention when the API was designed). It's possible that
Vulkan effectively requires recent hardware currently, but that's
because Vulkan was designed for it. E.g. current hardware was used to
determine the minimum capabilities a Vulkan driver should support. Also
nobody is going to bother writing Vulkan drivers for old hardware.

OpenGL(ES) drivers on the other hand are a true nightmare of
complexity, which can be seen on the numerous bugs implementations have.

Vulkan is still new, but there's no reason why it wouldn't be available
on _more_ platform when the time comes. Vendors will get bored of
writing complex and slow GL drivers.

Vulkan helps media players too, because media players need to deal with
large quantities of data (video frames). Vulkan's manual memory
management allows you to make more efficient choices and to avoid slow,
emulated code paths.