If glBufferStorage() is available, we can replace our usage of
glBufferSubData() with persistently mapped storage via
glMappedBufferRange().
This has 1 disadvantage:
1. It's not supported everywhere, it requires GL 4.4 or
GL_EXT_buffer_storage. But every GPU of the last 10 years should
implement it. So we check for it and keep the old code.
The old code can also be forced via GDK_GL_DISABLE=buffer-storage.
But it has 2 advantages:
1. It is what Vulkan does, so it unifies the two renderers' buffer
handling.
2. It is a significant performance boost in use cases with large vertex
buffers. Those are pretty rare, but do happen with lots of text at a
small font size. An example would be a small font in a maximized VTE
terminal or the overview in gnome-text-editor.
A custom benchmark tailored for this problem can be created with:
tests/rendernode-create-tests 1000000 text.node
This creates a node file called "text.node" that draws 1 million text
nodes.
(Creating that test takes a minute or so. A smaller number may be useful
on less powerful hardware than my Intel Tigerlake laptop.)
The difference can then be compared via:
tools/gtk4-rendernode-tool benchmark --runs=20 text.node
and
GDK_GL_DISABLE=buffer-storage tools/gtk4-rendernode-tool benchmark --runs=20 text.node
For my laptop, the difference is:
before: 1.1s
after: 0.8s
Related: !7021
It's not just unused, it's also wrong.
We are reading from the buffer when reallocating the vertex buffer
and memcpy()ing the old into the new buffer - at that point we read from
it.
This heaves over an inital chunk of code from the Vulkan renderer to
execute shaders.
The only shader that exists for now is a shader that draws a single
texture.
We use that to replace the blit op we were doing before.
