Prior to this point, we were treating them as flattened, as they are in
old-style tessellation control shaders, and still are for structs in
new-style shaders. This is not true for outputs; output composites are
not flattened at all. This semantic mismatch broke a Vulkan CTS test.
It should now pass.
To facilitate an improved linking-by-name use case for older GL,
we will be more aggressive about merging struct definitions, even for
rather unrelated cases where we don't strictly need to use type aliases.
In Metal render pipelines don't have an option to set a sampleMask
parameter, the only way to get that functionality is to set the
sample_mask output of the fragment shader to this value directly.
We also need to take care to combine the fixed sample mask with the
one that the shader might possibly output.
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.
When inside a loop, treat any read of outer expressions to happen
multiple times, forcing a temporary of said outer expressions.
This avoids the problem where we can end up relying on loop-invariant code motion to happen in the
compiler when converting optimized shaders.
When we see a switch block which only contains one default block, emit a
do {} while(false) statement instead, which is far more idiomatic and
readable anyways.
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.
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.
