A Silk.NET.RHI library

[LouChiSoft]

This is a slightly related follow up to my previous suggestion about Slang found here: #2467.

Silk supports DX12, Vulkan and MoltenVK for Apple devices. This is probably enough to do "mid-level" RHI graphics API. Similar to SDL's new GPU API that takes the big three (or in the this case 2 + MoltenVK) and abstracts away a lot of the boiler plate that makes using them tedious. Vulkan especially.

My reasoning is that with 3.0 coming there will be a new API for windowing and as mentioned in the post above there is at least the intention to have Slang support. I feel like there could be some real value in having a "Silk API" for graphics that plugs the gaps between the APIs. For example, instead of getting the Vulkan surface from the window and passing that to a Vulkan pipeline you would have a Silk Window and pass it to a Silk graphics pipeline and the API would handle identifying which surface it needs based on which API it's currently using.

If setup correctly I could imagine a system that would be really well polished and straight forward to use and would give an opportunity to make the graphics API more C# like instead of marshalling data back and forth between the native boundary. And with Slang supporting basically every shader target under the sun and the ability to reflect back the structs used in them, if there was a source code generator that could map the Slang structs to C# structs you would have a really solid setup for passing data to and from the GPU.

Would love to discuss the potential value further if interested

[aquagoose]

Silk.NET 3.0 will be using SDL3 which will likely be the recommended option to use for an RHI library.

[LouChiSoft]

It is? I thought I read in the Windowing proposal that SDL was being dropped. I guess that's out of date?

In that case would there be any room for extending the SDL API? Based on the discussions I have seen in the SDL repo about the GPU API they have no intention of supporting more than the vertex, fragment and compute stages of the pipeline. Which while you can do some very powerful stuff with these shaders as proven by Epic and Unreal Engine still leaves a lot on the table. Especially modern features like bindless rendering, ray tracing, mesh shaders etc.

If Silk was going to adopt some kind of RHI layer I would have hoped that it supports the modern features that games and engines are moving towards

[ykafia]

Would be a waste of efforts TBF, RHI are usually tailored to engine/renderer. It's very hard to abstract everything for every use cases and devices and the only RHI that begins to achieve that is WebGPU.