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.
Metal is picky about interface matching. If the types don't match
exactly, down to the number of vector components, Metal fails pipline
compilation. To support pipelines where the number of components
consumed by the fragment shader is less than that produced by the vertex
shader, we have to fix up the fragment shader to accept all the
components produced.
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.
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.
This maps them to their MSL equivalents. I've mapped `Coherent` to
`volatile` since MSL doesn't have anything weaker than `volatile` but
stronger than nothing.
As part of this, I had to remove the implicit `volatile` added for
atomic operation casts. If the buffer is already `coherent` or
`volatile`, then we would add a second `volatile`, which would be
redundant. I think this is OK even when the buffer *doesn't* have
`coherent`: `T *` is implicitly convertible to `volatile T *`, but not
vice-versa. It seems to compile OK at any rate. (Note that the
non-`volatile` overloads of the atomic functions documented in the spec
aren't present in the MSL 2.2 stdlib headers.)
`restrict` is tricky, because in MSL, as in C++, it needs to go *after*
the asterisk or ampersand for the pointer type it's modifying.
Another issue is that, in the `Simple`, `GLSL450`, and `Vulkan` memory
models, `Restrict` is the default (i.e. does not need to be specified);
but MSL likely follows the `OpenCL` model where `Aliased` is the
default. We probably need to implicitly set either `Restrict` or
`Aliased` depending on the module's declared memory model.
The old method of using a different unpacked matrix type doesn't work
for scalar alignment. It certainly wouldn't have any effect for a square
matrix, since the number of columns and rows are the same. So now we'll
store them as arrays of packed vectors.
We used to use the Binding decoration for this, but this method is
hopelessly broken. If no explicit MSL resource remapping exists, we
remap automatically in a manner which should always "just work".
There is a risk that we try to preserve a loop variable through multiple
iterations, even though the dominating block is inside a loop.
Fix this by analyzing if a block starts off by writing to a variable. In
that case, there cannot be any preservation going on. If we don't, pretend the
loop header is reading the variable, which moves the variable to an
appropriate scope.
Atomics are not supported on images or texture_buffers in MSL.
Properly throw an error if OpImageTexelPointer is used (since it can
only be used for atomic operations anyways).
This is necessary to deal with indirect draws, where the draw parameters
are given in a buffer instead of passed by the CPU. For normal draws,
the draw parameters are set with Metal's `setVertexBytes:` method.
This undoes the change to add the vertex count to the aux buffer,
rendering that entire discussion largely moot. Oh well. It was a
discussion that needed to happen anyway.
Structs are aligned as you would expect in MSL (maximum member
alignment), and it is not minimum 16 bytes like in std140.
Also rename the dummy "pad" members to a reserved naming scheme.
This is a fairly fundamental change on how IDs are handled.
It serves many purposes:
- Improve performance. We only need to iterate over IDs which are
relevant at any one time.
- Makes sure we iterate through IDs in SPIR-V module declaration order
rather than ID space. IDs don't have to be monotonically increasing,
which was an assumption SPIRV-Cross used to have. It has apparently
never been a problem until now.
- Support LUTs of structs. We do this by interleaving declaration of
constants and struct types in SPIR-V module order.
To support this, the ParsedIR interface needed to change slightly.
Before setting any ID with variant_set<T> we let ParsedIR know
that an ID with a specific type has been added. The surface for change
should be minimal.
ParsedIR will maintain a per-type list of IDs which the cross-compiler
will need to consider for later.
Instead of looping over ir.ids[] (which can be extremely large), we loop
over types now, using:
ir.for_each_typed_id<SPIRVariable>([&](uint32_t id, SPIRVariable &var) {
handle_variable(var);
});
Now we make sure that we're never looking at irrelevant types.
Even as of Metal 2.1, MSL still doesn't support arrays of buffers
directly. Therefore, we must manually expand them. In the prologue, we
define arrays holding the argument pointers; these arrays are what the
transpiled code ends up referencing. We might be able to do similar
things for textures and samplers prior to MSL 2.0.
Speaking of which, also enable texture arrays on iOS MSL 1.2.
