Hi! I am Bas Nieuwenhuizen. For my day job I am an SRE at Google Switzerland and outside of that I develop graphics drivers. My views expressed on this site are my own and may not represent the opinions of my employer.
On this blog I expect to be writing about my experience developing said graphics drivers.
More Information
I am a maintainer of an open source Vulkan driver for AMD hardware, as part of the Mesa project. I started this driver with Dave Airlie in 2016 and it has now grown to 4 full time contributors and the ability to run most games (often involving DXVK and/or VKD3D-Proton).
Furthermore, I contribute improvements to the wider ecosystem of GPU drivers for Linux and at Google I also contribute to the integration of these drivers in ChromeOS.
A brief history of how my hobbyist development journey
During high school and my earlier years in university I got into writing emulators. This eventually mostly devolved in writing N+1 iterations of tracing JIT compilers for CPU emulation.
At some point AMD did their push for open source graphics drivers and I got distracted by that. I started contributing to these drivers at the moment they were still catching up with all the OpenGL versions.
Of course I co-developed that with some of my own demos and tried to re-implement a game engine. In that development I got fed up with the limitations of OpenGL and AMD had just released their Mantle API and Vulkan was clearly going to be a thing. I thought that I could do things better and started implementing my own driver for a weird Frankenstein of Mantle + SPIR-V, because Vulkan wasn’t released at the time. Of course, I ended up being distracted by the compiler part of it again and never ended up bringing this driver to completion. At the same time AMD also promised an open source Vulkan driver that had no ETA or news at all. As time elapsed Dave Airlie eventually looked into writing a Vulkan driver as well and we decided to join forces in summer 2016. In a couple of months we went from zero to getting our first games (Dota 2 and The Talos Princple) working on the driver. To date developing this driver is still my main hobby.
Contact me
- bnieuwenhuizen on OFTC IRC
- blog at basnieuwenhuizen.nl
- Bas at the Linux Gaming Dev Discord
About this site
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