WITH_VULKAN_GUARDEDALLOC is a development option to use Blenders guarded
allocator when allocating internal vulkan driver resources. It does not provide any benefits
as this should be covered by vulkan validation and drivers are often ignoring this. This
change will remove the option from cmake and source code.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/129039
Adds a SPIR-V cache that skips frontend compilation for shaders
that are already compiled in a previous run of Blender.
Initially this was postponed to 4.4 but it was observed that
the vulkan backend didn't perform well on Windows in debug
builds. The reason is that the compiler would also be a debug
build which makes compiling a shader really slow. Starting
Blender on a debug build could take minutes.
So the decision was made to give this task a higher priority so
the vulkan backend would become more usable to developers
as well.
The cache is stored in the application cache dir. The SPIR-V
binaries can be used by different Blender versions so there
is no version specific cache folder.
**Sidecar**: SPIR-V files are a stream of bytes. There is no
header information that allow us to validate the stream. To
add basic validations we could add our custom header or
a sidecar. It was chosen to use a sidecar as having the SPIR-V
files unmodified allows us to load them directly in
debug tools for analyzing.
**Retention**: Shaders that are not used are automatically
removed with a retention period of 30 days.
**Shader builder**: Shader builder cannot use the SPIR-V
cache as it uses stubs that returns invalid cache directories.
This would load/save the cache to the location where you
started the build.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/128741
This PR introduces parallel shader compilation for Vulkan shader
modules. This will improve shader compilation when switching to material
preview or EEVEE render preview. It also improves material compilation.
However in order to measure the differences shaderc needs to be updated.
PR has been created so we can already start with the code review. This
PR doesn't include SPIR-V caching, what will land in a separate PR as
it needs more validation.
Parallel shader compilation has been tested on AMD/NVIDIA on Linux.
Testing on other platforms is planned in the upcoming days.
**Performance**
```
AMD Ryzen™ 9 7950X × 32, 64GB Ram
Operating system: Linux-6.8.0-44-generic-x86_64-with-glibc2.39 64 Bits, X11 UI
Graphics card: Quadro RTX 6000/PCIe/SSE2 NVIDIA Corporation 4.6.0 NVIDIA 550.107.02
```
*Test*: Start blender, open barbershop_interior.blend and wait until the viewport
has fully settled.
| Backend | Test | Duration |
| ------- | ------------------------- | -------- |
| OpenGL | Coldstart/No subprocesses | 1:52 |
| OpenGL | Coldstart/8 Subprocesses | 0:54 |
| OpenGL | Warmstart/8 Subprocesses | 0:06 |
| Vulkan | Coldstart Without PR | 0:59 |
| Vulkan | Warmstart Without PR | 0:58 |
| Vulkan | Coldstart With PR | 0:33 |
| Vulkan | Warmstart With PR | 0:08 |
The difference in time (why OpenGL is faster in a warm start is that all
shaders are cached). Vulkan in this case doesn't cache anything and all
shaders are recompiled each time. Caching the shaders will be part of
a future PR. Main reason not to add it to this PR directly is that SPIR-V
cannot easily be validated and would require a sidecar to keep SPIR-V
compatible with external tools..
**NOTE**:
- This PR was extracted from #127418
- This PR requires #127564 to land and libraries to update. Linux lib
is available as attachment in this PR. It works without, but is as slow as
single threaded compilation.
Pull Request: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/127698
