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.
MSL does not support this, so we have to emulate it by passing it around
as a varying between stages. We use a special "user(clipN)" attribute
for this rather than locN which is used for user varyings.
Support flattening StorageOutput & StorageInput matrices and arrays.
No longer move matrix & array inputs to separate buffer.
Add separate SPIRFunction::fixup_statements_in & SPIRFunction::fixup_statements_out
instead of just SPIRFunction::fixup_statements.
Emit SPIRFunction::fixup_statements at beginning of functions.
CompilerMSL track vars_needing_early_declaration.
Pass global output variables as variables to functions that access them.
Sort input structs by location, same as output structs.
Emit struct declarations in order output, input, uniforms.
Regenerate reference shaders to new formats defined by above.