Some older iOS devices don't support layered rendering. In that case,
don't set `[[render_target_array_index]]`, because the compiler will
reject the shader in that case. The client will then have to unroll the
render pass manually.
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.
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.
Like with `point_size` when not rendering points, Metal complains when
writing to a variable using the `[[depth]]` qualifier when no depth
buffer be attached. In that case, we must avoid emitting `FragDepth`,
just like with `PointSize`.
I assume it will also complain if there be no stencil attachment and the
shader write to `[[stencil]]`, or it write to `[[color(n)]]` but there
be no color attachment at n.
Here, the inline uniform block is explicit: we instantiate the buffer
block itself in the argument buffer, instead of a pointer to the buffer.
I just hope this will work with the `MTLArgumentDescriptor` API...
Note that Metal recursively assigns individual members of embedded
structs IDs. This means for automatic assignment that we have to
calculate the binding stride for a given buffer block. For MoltenVK,
we'll simply increment the ID by the size of the inline uniform block.
Then the later IDs will never conflict with the inline uniform block. We
can get away with this because Metal doesn't require that IDs be
contiguous, only monotonically increasing.
If there are enough members in an IAB, we cannot use the constant
address space as MSL compiler complains about there being too many
members. Support emitting the device address space instead.
Some fallout where internal functions are using stronger types.
Overkill to move everything over to strong types right now, but perhaps
move over to it slowly over time.
Vulkan has two types of buffer descriptors,
`VK_DESCRIPTOR_TYPE_UNIFORM_BUFFER_DYNAMIC` and
`VK_DESCRIPTOR_TYPE_STORAGE_BUFFER_DYNAMIC`, which allow the client to
offset the buffers by an amount given when the descriptor set is bound
to a pipeline. Metal provides no direct support for this when the buffer
in question is in an argument buffer, so once again we're on our own.
These offsets cannot be stored or associated in any way with the
argument buffer itself, because they are set at bind time. Different
pipelines may have different offsets set. Therefore, we must use a
separate buffer, not in any argument buffer, to hold these offsets. Then
the shader must manually offset the buffer pointer.
This change fully supports arrays, including arrays of arrays, even
though Vulkan forbids them. It does not, however, support runtime
arrays. Perhaps later.
We were going down a tree of expressions multiple times and this caused
an exponential explosion in time, which was not caught until recently.
Fix this by blocking any traversal going through an ID more than one
time.
This fix overall improves performance by almost an order of magnitude on a
particular test shader rather than slowing it down by ~75x.
This command allows the caller to set the base value of
`BuiltInWorkgroupId`, and thus of `BuiltInGlobalInvocationId`. Metal
provides no direct support for this... but it does provide a builtin,
`[[grid_origin]]`, normally used to pass the base values for the stage
input region, which we will now abuse to pass the dispatch base and
avoid burning a buffer binding.
`[[grid_origin]]`, as part of Metal's support for compute stage input,
requires MSL 1.2. For 1.0 and 1.1, we're forced to provide a buffer.
(Curiously, this builtin was undocumented until the MSL 2.2 release. Go
figure.)
The only piece added by this extension is the `DeviceIndex` builtin,
which tells the shader which device in a grouped logical device it is
running on.
Metal's pipeline state objects are owned by the `MTLDevice` that created
them. Since Metal doesn't support logical grouping of devices the way
Vulkan does, we'll thus have to create a pipeline state for each device
in a grouped logical device. The upcoming peer group support in Metal 3
will not change this. For this reason, for Metal, the device index is
supplied as a constant at pipeline compile time.
There's an interaction between `VK_KHR_device_group` and
`VK_KHR_multiview` in the
`VK_PIPELINE_CREATE_VIEW_INDEX_FROM_DEVICE_INDEX_BIT`, which defines the
view index to be the same as the device index. The new
`view_index_from_device_index` MSL option supports this functionality.
This is needed to support `VK_KHR_multiview`, which is in turn needed
for Vulkan 1.1 support. Unfortunately, Metal provides no native support
for this, and Apple is once again less than forthcoming, so we have to
implement it all ourselves.
Tessellation and geometry shaders are deliberately unsupported for now.
The problem is that the current implementation encodes the `ViewIndex`
as part of the `InstanceIndex`, which in the SPIR-V environment at least
only exists in the vertex shader. So we need to work out a way to pass
the view index along to the later stages.
This implementation runs vertex shaders for all views up to the highest
bit set in the view mask, even those whose bits are clear. The fragments
for the inactive views are then discarded. Avoiding this is difficult:
calculating the view indices becomes far more complicated if we can only
run for those views which are set in the mask.
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).
- Replace ostringstream with custom implementation.
~30% performance uplift on vector-shuffle-oom test.
Allocations are measurably reduced in Valgrind.
- Replace std::vector with SmallVector.
Classic malloc optimization, small vectors are backed by inline data.
~ 7-8% gain on vector-shuffle-oom on GCC 8 on Linux.
- Use an object pool for IVariant type.
We generally allocate a lot of SPIR* objects. We can amortize these
allocations neatly by pooling them.
- ~15% overall uplift on ./test_shaders.py --iterations 10000 shaders/.
This is a pragmatic trick to avoid symbol collision where a project
links against SPIRV-Cross statically, while linking to other projects
which also use SPIRV-Cross statically. We can end up with very awkward
symbol collisions which can resolve themselves silently because
SPIRV-Cross is pulled in as necessary. To fix this, we must use
different symbols and embed two copies of SPIRV-Cross in this scenario,
now with different namespaces, which in turn leads to different symbols.
