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.
On MSL, the compiler refuses to allow access chains into a normal vector type.
What happens in practice instead is a read-modify-write where a vector type is
loaded, modified and written back.
The workaround is to convert a vector into a pointer-to-scalar before
the access chain continues to add the scalar index.
If a buffer rewrites its Offsets, all member references to that struct
are invalidated, and must be redirected, do so in to_member_reference,
but there might be other places where this is needed. Fix as required.
SPIR-V code relying on this is somewhat questionable, but seems to be
in-spec.
Do not attempt to defer declaration. It would happen to work in most
cases, but the edge case is where the first thing that happens to a
variable is being OpStore'd into.
DX may emit ArrayStride and MatrixStride of 16, but the size of the
object does not align with that and expect to pack other members inside
its last member.
The workaround is to emit array size/col/row one less than we expect and
rely on padding to carve out a "dead zone" for the last member.
- Fixes issue with clip_distance flattening in MSL where member to
flatten from would come from to_member_name, where it should have used
the builtin name directly. This member name was modified by this patch
and broke clip distance test shaders.
- Some cleanups with ir.meta, use ir.find_meta instead to not create
unnecessary hashmap nodes.
This avoids a lot of huge code changes.
Arrays generally cannot be copied in and out of buffers, at least no
compiler frontend seems to do it.
Also avoids a lot of issues surrounding packed vectors and matrices.
It is possible for a shader to declare two plain struct types which
simply share the same OpName without there being an implicit
value/buffer alias relationship.
For to_member_name(), make sure to use the type alias master when
resolving member names. The member name may be different in a type alias
master if the SPIR-V is being intentionally difficult.
