Khronos standards and “caps”

UPDATE: This post is just plain wrong. See correction HERE. Thanks to various people on twitter, especially Graham Sellers and Daniel Koch for pointing this out.

Just venting some frustration here. One of the annoying things in Khronos standards is the lack of required minimum capabilities, which makes writing portable code that much harder.  The minimum guarantees are very lax.  Just as an example, take work-group sizes in both OpenCL and OpenGL compute shaders. In both of these, you have to query to find out the maximum work group size supported which may turn out to be just 1.

Similarly, in OpenGL (and ES) compute shaders, there is no minimum guaranteed amount of local memory per workgroup. You have to query to ask how much shared memory per workgroup is supported, and the implementation can just say zero because there is no minimum mandated in the specification.

edit: Contrast this with DirectCompute where you have mandated specifications for both the amount of local memory and the work-group sizes which makes life so much simpler.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *