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Questions tagged [performance]

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26 views

Software Rendering Display Latency

I've been doing some reading as to how to reduce input delay on modern computing devices. A lot of my understanding from this comes from the VR research paper by Carmack explaining the numerous ...
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0answers
30 views

Where to store a very small set of shading constants in D3D12?

My rendering engine heavily uses implicit rendering techniques, so I have relatively little constant data to upload every frame (just 240 bytes of rendering settings; surface parameters are passed ...
3
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1answer
87 views

Compute shader textures compared 2D float4 arrays

I am wondering is there a difference in performance between using floating point textures as my 2D float4 array vs just passing in 2D float4 arrays? 2D float arrays eliminate the need to do texture ...
4
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2answers
107 views

Should you measure mesh complexity in triangles or vertices?

I have seen people using either vertices or triangles as a quick heuristic to estimate mesh memory usage and mesh rendering time. I always thought vertices were better, because the number of vertices ...
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1answer
76 views

Are MMORPGs, specifically WoW, limited by their latency in terms of FPS?

It sounds crazy, but I've been doing a lot of reading on exactly why WoW performs very poorly, even on a 1080Ti / 8700k OC'd and overall, a high-end machine. Overclocking the CPU yielded great ...
6
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1answer
704 views

Why are tessellation shaders disliked?

I often hear that tessellation shaders aren't great for performance reasons. Something along the lines that if you try to use a tessellation shader, you'll find that the data you get out isn't ...
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0answers
155 views

Is a smaller local-size/threadgroup-size better for compute shader performance?

A compute shader defines the number of threads it requires to be executed. This number can be called "local size" or "threadgroup size" according to the API, and be factored into 3 separate dimensions ...
2
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0answers
154 views

Using GPU instead of CPU in Scala

I wrote a program that displays points expressed in 3D in a 2D canvas, using perspective projection. The aim is to display a cube. Each face of the cube is drawn by linearly interpolating the points ...
4
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1answer
716 views

How does MSAA performance scale?

I'm finding myself increasingly interested in rendering techniques utilizing multisampling for anti-aliasing (obviously), out-of-order transparency, volumes etc. Searching the web for performance ...
9
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1answer
323 views

The most performant way to organize vertex data on modern GPUs

Say I have a model made up of vertices, each with position, normal, tangent, and ...
4
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3answers
155 views

Dealing with wasted space when using SIMD on CPU for vector maths

I've been getting interested in SIMD programming on CPU using SSE recently, but I'm a complete noob on the subject. I found this article describing how to make an efficient float3 type using the ...
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3answers
113 views

How can an OpenGL visualization run for weeks?

For an art project, I need to make an OpenGL visualization run for at least 4 weeks. Is this possible? I can pretty much choose the rest of the hardware and software.
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0answers
254 views

In Metal, what performance advantages are there, if any, to using vertex descriptors and the [[stage_in]] qualifier?

Metal seems to provide two very different ways to access vertex data in your vertex shader. You can: Create an MTLVertexDescriptor object, which describes vertex ...
4
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1answer
230 views

Tasks of a professional graphics programmer?

Currently I'm 16 and in high school and I love graphics programming and I'm seriously considering it as a career path. I was wondering what a day as a graphics programmer looks like for offline ...
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0answers
117 views

Can I voxelize 3D set of points without reconstructing surface first?

I have huge point cloud data I want to render them at interactive frame frate. Process I know is 1.point cloud data 2.triangulate it using delnauy or other triangulation algo 3.surface ...
5
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1answer
404 views

Performance impact during texture layer loading

Recently I have been having a rather confusing performance drop with loading in layers of a 2D texture array, but only in one case from what I can tell, leaving me to speculate on why it is happening ...
3
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1answer
349 views

GPU not reaching 100% usage when frame rate is dropping

I am making an iOS game using Unity. I am testing some shaders that I have made for the game, and in some cases the device will run at under 30 FPS but not have 100% device utilization. Sometimes a ...
1
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2answers
422 views

Challenges of Offline Rendering

What are some of the challenges of Offline Rendering? I know one problem that is faced is performance and rendering times, are there any more issues? Path Traced photos seem to have reached the ...
2
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1answer
311 views

Can I use QueryPerformanceCounter to measure single draw or compute call performance?

I know I can use QueryPerformanceCounter for measure time for whole single frame. But can I when it comes to OpenGL draw or compute call? I always assumed that, as ...
4
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1answer
530 views

Register pressure in Compute Shader

I'm in the process of writing a Ray Tracer using DirectCompute / HLSL. First, eye rays are generated (one per pixel). Then, rays are traced, shaded and reflected in a loop. Also, shadow rays for each ...
6
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2answers
370 views

How can I improve the performance of my custom Global Illumination approach?

I want to experiment with some new stuff about modern rendering techniques and in that way I'm trying to implement a custom GI (somewhere between pathtracing and instant radiosity). My scene is a bit ...
6
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1answer
314 views

Optimizing performance on hardware

I'm working on a webgl audio visualizer that uses particles, and I want to optimize rendering based on the user's hardware. I'd like to offer a "low quality" and "high quality" setting so that it ...
4
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1answer
192 views

How to get unique nearest neighbour?

There's already something called K-nearest neighbour algorithm with gives nearest neighbour to points. But what I want is unique neighbour which is not shared by any other neighbour. I've implemented ...
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0answers
444 views

Billboards or impostors when objects' instances are re-scaled [closed]

Billboarding/impostors mean, roughly, representing complex 3D objects in 2D or with simple quadrilaterals, for the sake of LOD systems. Consider the case of rendering a very numerous asteroid field ...
10
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1answer
199 views

Why did AMD's putting an SSD on a GPU board reduce latency so much?

AMD have recently been in the news with an interesting Radeon Pro board with a couple of M2 SSDs on it. As some of the more detailed stories (here or here, for example) note, the benefits may ...
7
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1answer
436 views

Estimating the area of a triangle-circle intersection

I am trying to implement Ray Tracing with Cones (Amanatides 1984). Instead of rays, cones are shot into the scene and intersected with geometry. Since multiple triangles can occupy the cone's aperture,...
4
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2answers
5k views

What are the differences between GPU instancing and standard instancing?

I have been reading a lot of debate on a new feature that will be available in the new version of the game engine Unity 5.4 - called GPU instancing. I understand the importance of instancing in ...
8
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1answer
768 views

How does everyone count “Rays per Second”?

Recently I'm developing a Monte-Carlo path tracer. To measure my tracer's performance, I decided to implement a simple mechanism to count how many rays can it trace in a second. Then here comes the ...
3
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1answer
324 views

Data structure and algorithm for clipping triangulation with leaf nodes of an octree

I have an application in which I am using an octree to store a volume mesh of axis-aligned bounding boxes (AABBs). Given a water-tight manifold triangle mesh, I need to: find if an AABB is ...
7
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2answers
218 views

What methods/technologies to reduce required performance for virtual reality are there?

I'm interested in virtual reality, but according to some sources, less than 1% of computers in use today have the necessary performance to run modern VR games, granted many of them are not intended ...
15
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3answers
4k views

Why do we have graphics frameworks like OpenGL and DirectX, when games could just draw pixels directly?

Games and other graphically intensive applications use frameworks like OpenGL and DirectX. Also they require features like pixel shader and DX12. But why would we need all these frameworks and GPU ...
11
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1answer
3k views

Loop performance in a shader

I am wondering what's the best way to integrate a dynamic loop function in a shader? First, it seems that dynamic arrays are not possible. So, is it better to create a maximum size array and only ...
8
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1answer
296 views

Do modern GPUs contain barrel shifters?

I'm aware that most modern GPUs, although designed for floating point, are more or less equivalent in integer performance these days, with a few caveats like the lack of a fused multiply add. I'm not ...
2
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0answers
230 views

Projecting light shapes

I am wondering how professional light visualizer software (like Capture Argo - WYSIWYG - Realizzer - LightConverse) project the lights on the objects (like stage, floor, people), even projecting the ...
15
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3answers
4k views

Difference between rendering in OpenGL and 3D animation software

With OpenGL and such I can render some pretty amazing looking things in "real time" 60 FPS. However, if I try to make a video of that same scene in let's say Maya, or 3ds Max it would take MUCH MUCH ...
10
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2answers
347 views

With modern fillrates and deferred rendering, is occlussion culling still relevant?

For example, while it's the current top-of-the-line GPU, the GTX 980 has a staggering 72.1 gigapixels/second fillrate, which with back-to-front rendering and/or Z buffer checks, seems almost ...
2
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1answer
125 views

Is there some book about how to design a 3D math lib? [closed]

3D math covers vector algebra and matrix algebra, which are easily calculated on paper, but not so easy when coding them effectively. I only leant some basic algorithms on matrix in my Data Structure ...
8
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2answers
153 views

When is it better to upload partial model matrices to the vertex shader?

As of now, when rendering my scene and while iterating through the scene graph, for each node its model matrix is calculated from the parent's model matrix and the scene node's pose. This is quite ...
8
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1answer
488 views

Shader uniform performance

I'd like to know if there's any performance impact based on how I struct my shader uniforms. For instance, is passing 4 floats worse than passing a single vec4?
14
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1answer
670 views

Is a constant condition more costly than switching shaders?

In general, branching in shaders is not a good idea. But now I have a shader with a condition that is constant with respect to the entire draw call. So the branch that is executed is always the same ...
5
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2answers
2k views

How to reduce the number of draw calls when rendering one object multiple times?

Especially when rendering particle effects, the same object needs to be rendered several times with slightly modified properties. But these changes are often limited to properties like pose or ...
10
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1answer
5k views

Why is accessing textures much slower when calculating the texture coordinate in the fragment shader?

When using textures in GLSL, it is best to calculate the final texture coordinates in the vertex shader and hand them over to the fragment shader using varyings. ...
19
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1answer
2k views

Why is this conditional in my fragment shader so slow?

I have set up some FPS-measuring code in WebGL (based on this SO answer) and have discovered some oddities with the performance of my fragment shader. The code just renders a single quad (or rather ...
9
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1answer
2k views

What is the performance tradeoff between forward and deferred rendering?

Forward rendering is the process of computing a radiance value for a surface fragment directly from input geometry and lighting information. Deferred rendering splits that process into two steps: ...
11
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1answer
974 views

When to disable perspective correct interpolation ( noperspective )

In GLSL, perspective correct interpolation of vertex attributes is the default setting - one can disable it for specific vertex attributes by using the noperspective qualifier. Other than in post-...
36
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3answers
13k views

When is a compute shader more efficient than a pixel shader for image filtering?

Image filtering operations such as blurs, SSAO, bloom and so forth are usually done using pixel shaders and "gather" operations, where each pixel shader invocation issues a number of texture fetches ...
23
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2answers
5k views

What is the cost of changing state?

Programmers are supposed to have a fairly good idea of the cost of certain operations: for example the cost of an instruction on CPU, the cost of a L1, L2, or L3 cache miss, the cost of a LHS. When ...
10
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3answers
1k views

Why do Vertex Buffer Objects improve performance?

From my basic understanding, a Vertex Buffer Object works something like this (pseudo code): Normally, if one wanted to say, draw a square, one could issue line drawing commands. ...
20
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3answers
2k views

Performance of vector graphics versus bitmap or raster graphics

Sometimes I use vector graphics, simply because they look just slightly nicer in some cases, and other times, I use bitmap/raster graphics. I was wondering, are there any significant performance ...