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pervognsen

@pervognsen@mastodon.social

Performance, compilers, hardware, mathematics, computer science.

I've worked in or adjacent to the video game industry for most of my career.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

pervognsen, to random
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The age of bad AI-generated logo art for open source projects is upon us.

pervognsen, (edited )
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

@resistor The weird chromatic aberration and RGB fringing seemed to be more of an issue in all the early work on style transfer, which I took to be an artifact of CNNs.

ca1ne, to random
@ca1ne@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

> With Recall, locating files in a large download pileup or revisiting your browser history is easy. You can give commands to Recall in natural language, eliminating the need to type precise commands.

"We suck at UX so we'll need to record everything and run on a 40+ TOPS CPU to be able to provide even the most basic functionality. Do you like this, is this good?"

https://www.windowslatest.com/2024/05/20/microsoft-confirms-windows-11-recall-ai-hardware-requirements/

I'm sorry, but AI is mostly just doing simple things, incredibly inefficiently, in the most creepy way.

pervognsen, (edited )
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@ca1ne I'm still waiting for MS to show that they can ship any kind of search in any part of Windows that isn't a disaster. I can't think of anything that has ever worked. The async Start Menu search has been an ongoing disaster for the last 15 years. The file search in Explorer has never worked. You've always had to use third-party tools to get a functioning, productive search experience for any part of Windows.

pervognsen,
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

@dotstdy @ca1ne It's never been a technical barrier... I'm not going to take a cheap shot at PMs because the issue is bigger than any role like that but the issue is clearly related to company values, incentives and decision making rather than either design or technical competency.

pervognsen,
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

@dotstdy @ca1ne Or perhaps more accurately, the design and technical competency of a company or division is much less than the sum of its parts. There's plenty of competent designers and engineers at MS who could do a great job with search if they were allowed to do it.

pervognsen, to random
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

Who remembers this awesome jankfest? The IK was bleeding edge for 1998 and when that indie game Hellish Quart came out I remember getting flashbacks to Die By The Sword.

pervognsen, (edited )
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Any action game on PC that wasn't an FPS was pretty much guaranteed to be a janky mess in those days (especially the controls and difficulty tuning) but if you were lucky it was an awesome janky mess. Speaking of which, I remember being really confused when Severance: Blade of Darkness was re-launched the last few years and anachronistically re-branded as a soulslike. I loved Severance in 2001 and the stencil shadows were cool, but let's be real here.

pervognsen,
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

@SonnyBonds Oh man, how could I forget. Trespasser had so much potential and was not JUST a janky mess. When the Let's Play was a brand new genre, there was a classic LP on Trespasser with awesome commentary and production values from a poster on Something Awful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6A3SaRr26M&list=PL0058A651EB882B48

pervognsen,
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

@SonnyBonds I'd tried implementing a very basic rigid body physics engine based on some SIGGRAPH articles and Chris Hecker's articles in Game Developer and I had so much trouble getting static friction to work properly. When I saw how badly friction worked in Trespasser (I don't think I played it right at release), I felt a lot better.

unormal, to random
@unormal@mastodon.social avatar

thinking about her

pervognsen,
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

@unormal I'm kind of scared to go back and play it now. I remember MDK 2 being really good but I'm not gonna go out of my way to pop that bubble.

pervognsen,
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

@daviwil @unormal It's crazy to think now that MDK 2 was developed by Bioware.

sree, to random
@sree@ublog.thirdlaw.net avatar

Do big data people not know about value numbering?

pervognsen,
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@sree The Perlis joke about Lisp people knowing the value of everything and the cost of nothing except with big data people: they know neither.

regehr, to random
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my new favorite thing is this diagram of all 256 configurations of the ternlog instruction

https://www.sandpile.org/x86/ternlog.htm

pervognsen, (edited )
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

@rygorous @dougall @regehr Thresholding is such a useful formulation even for the basic connectives.

x & y = [x + y >= 2]
x | y = [x + y >= 1]

x & y & z = [x + y + z >= 3]
x | y | z = [x + y + z >= 1]

x -> y = [x <= y]

dpiponi, to random
@dpiponi@mathstodon.xyz avatar

It's a curious coincidence that before the idea of the warp drive there was this definition of warp:

"move (a ship) along by hauling on a rope attached to a stationary object on shore."

Suggests an alternative sci-fi idea for the meaning of "warp drive".

pervognsen,
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@dpiponi Imagine if it had been called a weft or woof drive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_and_weft

dotstdy, to random
@dotstdy@mastodon.social avatar

I feel like the most difficult part of subgroups and GPU programming in general, is getting all the terminology straight in your head. Sometimes it seems like it would be easier just writing rdna asm directly. :')

pervognsen,
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@dotstdy You know what has never helped? Every IHV and API having their own incompatible terminology!

pervognsen,
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

@dotstdy It's my favorite too. It used to be fashionable to deride it as marketing wank but I think it's evocative and memorable and the hierarchy of the terms makes sense once you know that warp isn't a sci-fi word.

pervognsen,
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@dotstdy I think the marketing wank accusation is justified when we're counting each separate lane of a SIMD unit as a CUDA core. :)

pervognsen, to random
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

I haven't done any real Vulkan programming since 1.0. Are there any good guides that skip all the legacy junk and only show the streamlined 1.3 way of doing things?

pervognsen,
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

@zeux What's the compatibility landscape like for GPUs that support 1.3 but don't support bindless? I was hoping to just require bindless.

pervognsen,
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

@zeux Oh, I just remembered you had your Niagara project. Do you recommend using that as a reference for good practices, etc?

dpiponi, to random
@dpiponi@mathstodon.xyz avatar

It's not like I had any chance of resisting when one of my favourite books is published in a fancy new hardback edition

pervognsen,
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

@dpiponi Where are you on Player of Games vs Use of Weapons?

shriramk, to random
@shriramk@mastodon.social avatar

You can't be the financial capital of the world if you can't monetize everything in the news. (Hidden Grounds cafe, NYC.)

pervognsen,
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

@shriramk I hope you put that $10 in the Kendrick jar.

amonakov, to random
@amonakov@mastodon.gamedev.place avatar

(prompted by discussion of detecting bitwise and-not earlier in GCC's optimization pipeline)

My ideal compiler IR would not have and/or/xor as distinct bitwise ops, just generic ternlog and probably the corresponding two-operand function ("bilog"?) too.

pervognsen,
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

@amonakov For a reason I don't fully understand, this seems to be common in GPUs but not in CPUs. Even the VPTERNLOG instructions in AVX-512 were inherited from Larrabee AFAIK. Maybe GPU ISAs are less averse to many-operand instructions than CPU ISAs have traditionally been?

pervognsen,
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

@amonakov Hmm, I just remembered Southern Islands had a metric truckload of 3 in, 1 out instructions and thought I remembered ternlog being in there. But looking through the ISA manual now I can't find it.

pervognsen,
@pervognsen@mastodon.social avatar

@rygorous @amonakov What about the increased RF/operand forwarding port pressure from three input operands? Don't GPU cores usually have some additional tricks they can play with RF ports due to their latency-tolerant design? Does this figure into the CPU vs GPU difference at all?

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