processing / processing/processing4

`loadPixels` and `PGraphics` dependency batching in WebGPU

Abierto
#1,320 0 comentarios 0 reacciones 0 asignados Ver en GitHub

Nadie ha tomado este issue todavía.

webgpu
Lenguaje dominante
Java
Estrellas
494
Forks
183
Merge medio
4 h 39 min
PR fusionados (30 d)
3

Descripción

The processing API allows performing arbitrary GPU->CPU readback on demand via the loadPixels method. This is generally an extension of the immediate mode philosophy of processing but poses significant friction with modern graphics architectures. In contrast with opengl, which goes to significant lengths to preserve the illusion that GPU data is easily accessible, WebGPU is designed to foreground that GPU operations are asynchronous relative to the CPU timeline. While the API does support blocking on these operations, the expectation of most framework including bevy is that you won't.

Concretely why this matters is because modern graphics libraries really want to batch rendering together for efficiency reasons. For example, in Bevy, all cameras (which could be considered an analog to a PGraphics instance) want to render at the same time every frame. loadPixels introduces an architectural complication in that the current draw state may need to be flushed and made visible to any other graphics context at any arbitrary time.

In other words, beyond any performance concerns, this highlights a potential dependency problem between PGraphics instances:

  • In the event where multiple PGraphics instances aren't dependent on each other, batching works fine and we can delay flushing all their draw state til the end of frame.
  • When a PGraphics is used in another PGraphics, e.g. an off-screen texture used by something in rendering to the screen, we could simply just track a relative order to ensure the Bevy Camera for one runs before the other.
  • If the user calls loadPixels, we need to flush the draw state right now and make the texture visible to potentially any other CPU code.

Approach for WebGPU with Bevy

We should start just by mirroring the immediate mode API. What this means is that we'll mirror the drawStart, flush, drawEnd lifecycle. Set CameraOutputMode::Skipat the beginning of each frame for each surface to render only to the intermediate texture and CameraOutputMode::Write only when calling drawEnd.

We can handle loadPixels in this way just by doing a synchronous readback after a flush. It's fine, and will superficially look like opengl's behavior from the user perspective.

Because this immediate mode approach likely has some undesirable overhead (although tbd, it may be pretty minimal), we can do our own dependency/dirty tracking if necessary down the line. What this would look like is keeping an in-flight dependency graph of PGraphics and how they're being used, and only trigger flushes when they acutally need to be made visible to other graphics contexts. This isn't hard to do but will make the implementation more confusing.

Guía de contribución

Abrir la guía de contribución

Primeros pasos

  1. Lee el issue completo y luego la guía de contribución del proyecto.
  2. Comenta en el issue que vas a ocuparte — evita que dos personas hagan lo mismo.
  3. Haz un fork del repositorio y trabaja en una rama.
  4. Abre un pull request que haga referencia al número del issue.

Línea de trabajo

Empieza rastreando la implementación de WebGPU de loadPixels, PGraphics y el ciclo de vida de drawStart, flush y drawEnd descritos en el issue. Comprueba cómo se establece CameraOutputMode para cada superficie y, a continuación, valida el enfoque de modo inmediato con readback síncrono y el orden de renderizado y los requisitos de visibilidad indicados.

Escrito por el modelo de indexación a partir del texto del issue.

Evaluación

Área
computer-graphics
Tipo de issue
Nueva funcionalidad
Dificultad
5/5
Tiempo estimado
Más de una semana
Estado de actividad
Estancado
Claridad
Bastante claro
Aptitud para principiantes
25/100

Recibe los nuevos issues en tu correo

Un resumen breve de issues de GitHub para principiantes.