This should hopefully reduce underutilization of the GPU, especially on
GPUs where the thread execution width is greater than the number of
control points.
This also simplifies initialization by reading the buffer directly
instead of using Metal's vertex-attribute-in-compute support. It turns
out the only way in which shader stages are allowed to differ in their
interfaces is in the number of components per vector; the base type must
be the same. Since we are using the raw buffer instead of attributes, we
can now also emit arrays and matrices directly into the buffer, instead
of flattening them and then unpacking them. Structs are still flattened,
however; this is due to the need to handle vectors with fewer components
than were output, and I think handling this while also directly emitting
structs could get ugly.
Another advantage of this scheme is that the extra invocations needed to
read the attributes when there were more input than output points are
now no more. The number of threads per workgroup is now lcm(SIMD-size,
output control points). This should ensure we always process a whole
number of patches per workgroup.
To avoid complexity handling indices in the tessellation control shader,
I've also changed the way vertex shaders for tessellation are handled.
They are now compute kernels using Metal's support for vertex-style
stage input. This lets us always emit vertices into the buffer in order
of vertex shader execution. Now we no longer have to deal with indexing
in the tessellation control shader. This also fixes a long-standing
issue where if an index were greater than the number of vertices to
draw, the vertex shader would wind up writing outside the buffer, and
the vertex would be lost.
This is a breaking change, and I know SPIRV-Cross has other clients, so
I've hidden this behind an option for now. In the future, I want to
remove this option and make it the default.
In SPIR-V, there are always two inner levels and four outer levels, even
if the input patch isn't a quad patch. But in MSL, due to requirements
imposed by Metal, only one inner level and three outer levels exist when
the input patch is a triangle patch. We must explicitly ignore any write
to the nonexistent second inner and fourth outer levels in this case.
These are transpiled to kernel functions that write the output of the
shader to three buffers: one for per-vertex varyings, one for per-patch
varyings, and one for the tessellation levels. This structure is
mandated by the way Metal works, where the tessellation factors are
supplied to the draw method in their own buffer, while the per-patch and
per-vertex varyings are supplied as though they were vertex attributes;
since they have different step rates, they must be in separate buffers.
The kernel is expected to be run in a workgroup whose size is the
greater of the number of input or output control points. It uses Metal's
support for vertex-style stage input to a compute shader to get the
input values; therefore, at least one instance must run per input point.
Meanwhile, Vulkan mandates that it run at least once per output point.
Overrunning the output array is a concern, but any values written should
either be discarded or overwritten by subsequent patches. I'm probably
going to put some slop space in the buffer when I integrate this into
MoltenVK to be on the safe side.
