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Showing posts from February, 2022

optimizing llvmpipe vertex/fragment processing.

Around 2 years ago while I was working on tessellation support for llvmpipe, and running the heaven benchmark on my Ryzen, I noticed that heaven despite running slowly wasn't saturating all the cores. I dug in a bit, and found that llvmpipe despite threading rasterization, fragment shading and blending stages, never did anything else while those were happening. I dug into the code as I clearly remembered seeing a concept of a "scene" where all the primitives were binned into and then dispatched. It turned out the "scene" was always executed synchronously. At the time I wrote support to allow multiple scenes to exist, so while one scene was executing the vertex shading and binning for the next scene could execute, and it would be queued up. For heaven at the time I saw some places where it would build 36 scenes. However heaven was still 1fps with tess, and regressions in other areas were rampant, and I mostly left them in a branch. The reasons so many things were