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5 hours ago by vvanders

While broadly right this has some inaccurate parts, in particular:

> If we were talking about OpenGL, there would be absolutely nothing you can do. In OpenGL or other older APIs, it’s only possible to do API calls from one thread.

Isn't really true. You can load textures off thread[1] and other things which come in handy. Vulkan expands that but I've done multithreaded texture loading for instance almost a decade ago.

This is particular important if your not loading compressed textures as there's usually a tiling/swizzle pass and the texture copy can be significant on large textures(unless you're using something like eglCreateImageKHR).

[1] https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/OpenGL_and_multithreadin...

5 hours ago by hertzrat

> Unreal Engine 4 is open source

Another small mistake here as well. The source is available to read and modify under license but it’s not open source

4 hours ago by xyzzy_plugh

The fact that this "mistake" occurs so frequently and is so trivial to make just tells me that the meaning you want it to have will not survive in the long run.

You are correct that it isn't Open Source as defined by the Open Source Initiative, nor does it use an Open Source Initiative Approved License.

None of that information, however, is helpful to the author or really changes anything about the article.

4 hours ago by willis936

Just because there are people who don’t understand what “free as in beer” means doesn’t mean that people should stop teaching them what it means.

4 hours ago by ekianjo

Because "open source" means absolutely nothing. We should use "Libre/Free Software" or refer to actual licenses to be more accurate.

3 hours ago by yellowapple

Except "open source" does have a meaning - specifically, the one defined by the Open Source Initiative.

3 hours ago by Bekwnn

I've always referred to it as "(has) source access". It is a bit frustrating and misleading when people refer to it as open source.

3 hours ago by swalsh

I call it "source available"

2 hours ago by Jasper_

In my experience, even the best Android drivers just took locks when using OpenGL from multiple threads, even for resource creation, so it's sort of moot.

2 hours ago by vvanders

That depends largely on the driver. It's not a guarantee but I've seen pretty solid perf wins on the drivers that support it.

From a hardware perspective just about every Android SoC minus a few odd ones have unified memory so there's really no reason for them to take a lock, at least for the heavy part of the operations that copy the texture and tile/swizzle.

2 hours ago by withinboredom

> just about every Android SoC minus a few odd ones

All those users will leave you a one star review when it crashes on their device.

4 hours ago by geswit2x

>”Unreal 4 will have...”

Unreal Engine 5 is coming...

5 hours ago by Animats

"Unreal Engine 4 will have a Game Thread and a Render Thread ..."

This seems dated. UE4 shipped in 2015.

4 hours ago by jayd16

Probably just poor word choice. Links from 2018 and maybe younger are referenced.

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