I've known that framebuffer is the final destination of the rendering pipeline and swapchain contains many image. So what is the relation between those two things? Which one is the actual render target? And does the framebuffer later attach the final picture of the current frame on the image view? If so, how will it transfer?
Describing this via paint or diagram would be pleased.
VkFramebuffer + VkRenderPass defines the render target.
Render pass defines which attachment will be written with colors.
VkFramebuffer defines which VkImageView is to be which attachment.
VkImageView defines which part of VkImage to use.
VkImage defines which VkDeviceMemory is used and a format of the texel.
Or maybe in opposite sequence:
VkDeviceMemory is just a sequence of N bytes in memory.
VkImage object adds to it e.g. information about the format (so you can address by texels, not bytes).
VkImageView object helps select only part (array or mip) of the VkImage (like stringView, arrayView or whathaveyou does). Also can help to match to some incompatible interface (by type casting format).
VkFramebuffer binds a VkImageView with an attachment.
VkRenderpass defines which attachment will be drawn into
So it's not like you do not use an image. You do, through the Vulkan Framebuffer.
Swapchain image is no different from any other image. Except that the driver is the owner of the image. You can't destroy it directly or allocate it yourself. You just borrow it from the driver for the duration between acquire and present operation.
There's (usually) more of the swapchain images for the purposes of buffering and advance rendering. AFAIK you would need a separate VkFramebuffer for each image (which is annoying, but more in tune with what actually happens underneath).
Probably the best single sentence from the Vulkan spec that describes framebuffers is:
The specific image views that will be used for the attachments, and
their dimensions, are specified in VkFramebuffer objects.
Yes, you would need a VkFramebuffer object for each image in a swapchain, but you generally would need to allocate only one VkMemory for a depth buffer VkImage and then add the VkImageView for that single depth buffer VkImage to all of your framebuffers.
Related
I'm using rust and the core-graphics crate so I don't have access to a lot of the conventional macos gui APIs. I also can't just do the drawing operations to a bitmap context and then draw that to the screen context, since I only have ownership of a handful of said operations and I want to capture everything in the context exactly as it's shown on-screen. That said:
Given a CGContextRef retrieved from NSGraphicsContext::currentContext representing content being drawn on the screen, is it possible to capture a region of that to a CGImage?
Based on my (limited) understanding of other graphics libraries I assume the general shape of the solution is to create a CGBitmapContext, draw onto it from my CGContextRef, and then call CGBitmapContext::CGBitmapContextCreateImage -- but I can't find any way to get data out of a screen-based CGContext.
Very new to graphics in general, starting off with Metal for immediate needs, will try out OpenGL soon enough.
Was wondering what the question means in lay man terms. Also, what is the extent of 'n', I have just used it as 0 in the 2D triangle I made.
In general, the color attachment(s) are where rendered images are stored (at least temporarily) during a render pass. It is common to only use one color attachment at index 0, so what you're doing is fine. It is also possible to render to multiple color attachments simultaneously, which is why there's an array. It's an advanced technique that you don't have to worry about until you see the need, at which point it should be straightforward how to do it.
There are two places where colorAttachments[n] appears in Metal. First is in MTLRenderPipelineDescriptor. The other is in MTLRenderPassDescriptor.
In both cases, the extent is given in the Metal Implementation Limits table, in the "Render targets" section, in the row labelled "Maximum number of color render targets per render pass descriptor".
For MTLRenderPipelineDescriptor, colorAttachments[n] is a reference to a MTLRenderPipelineColorAttachmentDescriptor. Here, you configure the pixel format, write mask, and color blending operation.
For MTLRenderPassDescriptor, colorAttachments[n] is a reference to a MTLRenderPassColorAttachmentDescriptor. This is a subclass of MTLRenderPassAttachmentDescriptor, which is where most of its properties are defined. Here, you configure which part of which texture you will render to, what should happen to that texture's data when the render pass starts and ends, and, if it's to be cleared, what color it should be cleared to.
Information about color attachments is split across those two objects based on how expensive it is to change. The render pipeline state object is fairly expensive to create from the pipeline descriptor. You would typically create all of your pipeline state objects once in a run and reuse them for the rest of your app's lifetime.
By contrast, you will create render command encoders from render pass descriptors fairly often; at least once per frame. They are relatively inexpensive to create, so you can change the descriptor and create a new one to render elsewhere.
The render pipeline state's color attachment pixel format has to match the pixel format of the texture of the render command encoder's color attachment texture.
I am converting a full-screen effect to a compute shader so that I can take advantage of some features of compute that can't be done with fragment shaders. Right now, this full-screen effect uses stenciling to avoid writing to pixels which it should not affect, and I would like to mimic that behavior with my compute shader.
I know that I can write this info to a color channel somewhere, but I'm hoping to avoid that and instead just read the stencil bit directly in the compute shader. However, I can't find any way to bind a D24S8 buffer to a compute shader such that I can actually read the stencil bit. It seems to only provide the depth information.
Is there any way to do this? Google is failing me, because everyone calls it the depth/stencil buffer when talking about sampling depth values.
This is possible.
Create your D24S8 depth buffer Texture with the typeless format DXGI_FORMAT_R24G8_TYPELESS.
Create your DepthStencilView of the resource in Step 1 using the strongly typed format of DXGI_FORMAT_D24_UNORM_S8_UINT.
Create a ShaderResourceView of the stencil buffer for binding to the Compute Shader using the strongly typed format of DXGI_FORMAT_X24_TYPELESS_G8_UINT.
[Optional] Create a ShaderResourceView of the "depth" part of the resource using the strongly typed format DXGI_FORMAT_R24_UNORM_X8_TYPELESS.
Make sure you declare your stencil SRV in HLSL to be Texture2D<uint2> so you can access the Green channel (G8) which is where the stencil data will come from.
Note since Depth and Stencil are separate SRVs you'd need to declare two Texture2Ds in HLSL, one for each. eg:
Texture2D<float> depthBuffer; // Red contains depth.
Texture2D<uint2> stencilBuffer; // Green contains stencil. Red is unused.
I have an application which renders many filled polygons with OpenGL, in 2D. Filling is done by tesselation but performance is not optimal. 1900 polygons made up of 122000 vertex (that is, about 64 vertex per polygon) are displayed in about 3 seconds.
Apparently, the CPU is not the bottleneck, as if I replace calls to gluTessVertex by calls to glColor - just to test where is the bottleneck, performance is doubled.
I have the same problem with loading many small textures.
Now, which are the options to improve the performance? Seems that most time is spend in the geometry subsystem. Rendering is fast enough.
I already have a worker thread which does the load (so tesselation, texture binding) in one context, and another thread which does the draw in another context. The two contexts share objects via wglShareLists and it works like a charm.
Can I have a third thread in a third context which would handle also tesselation for half of the polygons? Anyone tried that? Is it safe? Any example of sharing objects between three contexts?
Forgot to say, I have an ATI Radeon HD 4550 graphics card, suppose it can handle more than 39kB/s of data.
Increase Performance
Sounds like you're using the old fixed-function pipeline.
If you're unsure of what that is, well, the following functions are a part of the fixed-function pipeline.
glBegin()
glEnd()
glVertex*()
glTexCoord*()
glNormal*()
glColor*()
etc.
Those functions are old and render geometry immediately. That means that each time you call the above functions, that geometry gets send to the GPU. By doing that a lot of times, you can easy make the FPS go way under 60 just by rendering simple things.
Now you need to use buffers and to be more precise VAOs with/or VBOs (and IBOs).
VBO or Vertex Buffer Object, is a buffer which can store vertices which you then can render. This is much much faster and better to use than glBegin() and glEnd(). When you create a VBO you supply it with vertices and they only require to be send to the GPU once, that's basically why they are fast, because they already are in the GPU and only require a single draw call instead of multiple.
The reason I said "with/or" is because in the newer versions you need to create a VAO which then would use a VBO, where before you could simply render the VBOs.
Tessellation
There are multiple ways to do tessellation and things which look like/would give the effect of tessellation.
For instance you could also simply render different models according to the required LOD (Level of Detail), thereby when you're up close to an object you then render the model with all it's details which probably would have a high vertices count. Then the further you're away from the model you simply render another version of that model but which have less vertices, which also equals less detail. Though if you can't really do that on something like terrain and definitely shouldn't do it on something like dynamic terrain and/or procedurally generated terrain.
You can also do actual geometry tessellation and you would do that through a Shader. Since tessellation is a really huge topic I will provide you with 2 urls which both explain and have code on them.
Both of these articles uses modern 4.0/4.0+ OpenGL.
http://prideout.net/blog/?p=48
http://antongerdelan.net/opengl/tessellation.html
Texturing
Generating and binding textures are still the same.
Instead of using gluBuild2DMipmaps() you can use glGenerateMipmap(GL_TEXTURE_2D); it was added in OpenGL version 3.0'ish if I remember correctly.
Again you can (and should) change all you glBegin() - glEnd() (and everything in between) calls out with VAOs and VBOs. You can store everything you want inside a buffer vertices, texture coordinates, normals, colors, etc. You can store the things in separate buffers or you can store them inside a single buffer, usually called an Interleaved Buffer or Interleaved VBO.
You wouldn't be needing glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D) and glDisable(GL_TEXTURE_2D) anymore, because you do that within a Shader, you bind textures and use them in a Shader, and since you create the Shader Program you can make it act however you want it to.
I am writing an iOS/Android game and looking for the most performant way to render my vertex data with OpenGL ES 2.0. I have two different kinds of data: dynamic data that changes its attributes every frame, for example the player or animated background objects, and static data such as the static background or the terrain. I googled a lot since yesterday, but I could not find a clear and unique answer to the question of what is the best was to render such data.
There are basically three options for rendering such data (If I do not miss one. If so, feel free to correct me.):
Vertex Arrays Only:
Just fill your vertex every frame on the CPU (including the dynamic data).
Vertex Buffer Objects Only:
Allocate a VBO on the GPU with GL_DYNAMIC_DRAW where both, the dynamic and static data is stored. The dynamic data is then updated every frame via glBufferSubData.
Use both:
Static data is stored and render with a VBO and the dynamic data is rendered with a Vertex Array. With this option, we need two rendering passes, one for rendering the VBO and one for rendering the vertex array.
Since the first option does not exploit the immutability of the static data and since the third option requires two rendering passes, my guess is that I should go with the second option. However, I am absolutely not sure about this and I hope you can clarify my confusion.
Allocate two Vertex Buffer Objects. One with hint GL_DYNAMIC_DRAW that will be updated frequently. Allocate a second VBO for immutable data and use the hint GL_STATIC_DRAW. According to the API documentation, GL_STATIC_DRAW should be used for data that "will be modified once and used many times"; just what you need.
Speaking of two rendering passes here is probably a misuse of the term: what you do is to render your scene in two separate drawing commands. Since drawing commands run asynchronously, you should not expericence any performance hit by doing so.
A second rendering pass, on the other hand, is when you render the entire scene twice (see for example here) with different settings, or when you do some image processing effects on outputs of previous rendering passes.