I just read “Google Continues Working On “Magma” For Mesa Cross-Platform System Call Interface” on Phoronix and didn’t get it. That made me realise my knowledge and understanding of these things is barely existent. I did write an MS paint clone on linux in C++ a really long time ago and the entire thing was with opengl (it looked like crap), but since then… nothing.
So my understanding is that the graphics card (or CPU if there’s no graphics card), writes to a component which is connected to a screen and every cycle (every 1/60 seconds if 60Hz) the contents are sent or read by the screen. OpenGL provided a common interface to do so, but has been outdated since… a while and replaced by Vulkan. Then there are libraries either built on top of are parallel to OpenGL. Vulkan can be parallel or use OpenGL if that’s the only one supported IIRC.
However, I’m not sure if OpenGL is implemented at the hardware level (on the graphics card), software level, or both.
Furthermore, I don’t understand where Magma, Meta, and MESA come in.
Maybe my core understanding is wrong or just outdated. I can’t tell. Can anybody eplain?
Back in the '90s, when you created a game, you had to build three separate game engines for DOS, Windows, and MacOS, with their separate audio and video drivers. Or you just selected DOS and ignored all Mac users.
SDL was revolutionary, it could create an OS window for you to draw onto (or emulate a full-screen ‘window’ for DOS), and output 2D video and sound using the same SDL calls, on DOS, Windows, MacOS, Linux, AmigaOS, and even Sony PlayStation. So you had the same source code compiling to 6 different game binaries for each platform.
SDL does not implement 3D graphics, it just initializes OpenGL in a window and passes that to your code, because the game studios went all ‘fuck you I’m using OpenGL or I’m ignoring your XBOX entirely’ so even Microsoft was forced to support OpenGL on top of it’s incompatible proprietary DirectX 3D drivers, so OpenGL became the new standardized cross-platform API for 3D graphics.
Vulkan is a replacement for OpenGL which can use multiprocessor architecture, OpenGL is strictly single-threaded so your high-end 12-core gaming CPU ends up with one overworked core drawing all the graphics and 11 lazy cores performing Windows update in the background. The rules are already established, so every GPU and chip manufacturer will either support Vulkan or not have 3D graphics at all.
Those 11 lazy cores are actually working really hard at installing a new version of Notepad with Copilot and training it on every file on your PC