Looking at this, along with using all of Unity or Unreal's engine, make me think of the saying "standing on the shoulders of giants". I usually think of that more in an open source context, but the layers of abstraction that go into any area of modern computing are mindblowing at times. Humans are nuts.
Graphics are nuts. I did a lot of research months ago into how to build my own CPU, RAM, OS etc. from the ground up. I was able to figure out how a bunch of things worked that I didn't know before, and overall feel pretty confident in understanding at least a high level overview of a modern x86 computer.
I never figured out graphics cards. They are absurdly powerful and absurdly complex. The lack of documentation and open source drivers also does not help. As featured on HN a bit ago, AMD's drivers for Linux make up 10+% of the entire kernel codebase now!
I have no idea how the developers at Unity or Unreal stay sane. The amount of work that has gone into these base platforms we all take advantage of is...unreal.
A well-written GPU driver is a complete copy of an entire OS stack — inverted around the kernel driver. It's going to have at least one Unix-like OS (FW driver), a compiler, a driver-stack, network protocols, etc. I think of a GPU (and its SW stack) like Quade.
I think at this point a GPU card is more like a second computer inside your computer. I wonder if we could get rid of the regular computer and use a GPU only... are there any OS for a GPUs?
At a high level it showcases the idea of offloading expensive graphics computations to a separate chip. A modern window manager uses the graphics device in a similar way to avoid redrawing the contents of windows as you move them around the screen.
Yet AMD's driver support is hilariously awful. I spent four hours yesterday trying to install the Pro drivers for a 6700xt on ubuntu 20.04 using the official drivers. No luck.
Nvidia drivers may be closed source, but it just works.
