Anatomy of a frame in AnKi

This is going to be long so let’s start with the purpose of this article which essentially is to analyze a single frame from the renderer’s point of view. It will briefly describe all the passes and how the data get transformed in order to produce some pretty pixels into the screen.

Some disclaimers before we start:

  • It’s not about a perfect renderer. There isn’t such thing. Renderers should adapt to the context (type of game, platforms etc).
  • It’s not about a perfect renderer even for my context and standards. I always have ideas for further improvements and I have kept postponing this article until they get materialized. But then new ideas come up and I felt I shouldn’t wait any longer.
  • It’s not about a mobile (GPU) friendly renderer. It’s a desktop oriented one.
  • It doesn’t reflect how the renderer will look like in a month from now. I tweak it almost daily.

These are some terms used throughout this article:

  • Graphics pass: A series of drawcalls that affect the same output. In Vulkan terminology it’s a VkRenderPass pass with a single subpass.
  • Compute pass: A compute job or a series of compute jobs that affect the same output.
  • Render target: Part of the output of a graphics render pass.
  • Texture: A sampled image that is used as input in compute or graphics passes. Some render targets may be used as textures later on.
  • GI: Global illumination.
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Optimizing Vulkan for AMD and the tale of two Vulkan drivers

The first GPU AnKi run, almost a decade ago, was in fact an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. The first version of the deferred shading renderer run in that GPU and not only that. AnKi was running on Linux and the fglrx driver. I don’t remember experiencing many game breaking bugs back then, but then again, AnKi was quite simplistic at the time. One thing I remember was some depth buffer corruption that I had to workaround using a copy. Many years later I understood that this was a driver bug.

The love with ATI didn’t last long and AnKi end up being developed exclusively using nVidias. For many years AMD’s OpenGL driver didn’t have the quality or the features I wanted. Fast forward to today, things are looking far better. Firstly, Mesa has a quite decent OpenGL implementation, secondly, there is a very competitive Mesa Vulkan driver (RADV) and on top of that there is an second opensource Vulkan driver directly from AMD (AMDVLK). The cherry on top is a very good profiler for Vulkan and AMDVLK called Radeon GPU profiler. AMD regularly releases lots of documentation and optimization tips as part of their GPUOpen initiative. This is a great period to own AMD hardware for graphics development that’s why I had to get my hands on an AMD GPU.

In this post I’ll focus on some AMD specific optimizations and I’ll be comparing the two opensource Vulkan drivers.

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Porting AnKi to Vulkan part 2

In my Porting AnKi to Vulkan post I went into detail describing how AnKi’s interfaces changed to accommodate the Vulkan backend and how this backend looked like. Eight months have passed since then and a few things changed mainly towards greater flexibility. This post describes what are the differences with the older interfaces, how is the performance currently and what new extensions AnKi is using now.

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The journey of porting AnKi to Vulkan

Someone once said “make it work, make it fast, make it pretty” and I’m happy (and at the same time relieved) to say that the effort of porting AnKi to Vulkan just hit the first major milestone! It’s working! I think this is a good time to share a few thoughts on how this milestone was achieved, the pains and generally the overall experience. Disclaimer: Whatever you read in the following lines reflects my own views and not those of my current employer.

So let’s start from the beginning. Continue reading “The journey of porting AnKi to Vulkan”

Vulkan: The next Khronos graphics API… that is not OpenGL

This year’s GDC proved to be quite exciting. New technologies, new ideas and some heavyweight announcements. According to the press one of the most exciting presentations was Khronos’ Vulkan API and the demos running on top of it. That really depicted the momentum, the support and the commitment behind the new API.

This article gathers all the publicly shared information behind the new API and adds some personal thoughts in the mix. The fact that I had the pleasure to follow the development of Vulkan API very closely (I was involved early on in the development of a prototype Vulkan driver for ARM’s GPUs) will give some credibility to my personal views. But that doesn’t mean that my views reflect those of my employer. So, whatever you read in the following lines doesn’t necessary reflect the views of my current employer.

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