If you spend a long enough time in graphics development, the time will come eventually when you want to cast between different formats of a GPU resource. The problem is that information about how to do this was a bit hard to come by – until now.
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This post shows a way to compute derivatives for texture filtering in compute shaders (for visibility buffer shading). I was missing a step-by-step explanation of how to do this, but after some trial and error, the following method turned out to work well.
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Wicked Engine used Visual Studio to compile all its shaders for a long time, but that changed around a year ago (in 2021) when custom shader compiling tools were implemented. This blog highlights the benefits of this and may provide some new ideas if you are developing graphics programs or tools.
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Lately I’ve been interested in modernizing the geometry pipeline in the rendering engine, for example reducing the vertex shaders. It’s a well known fact that geometry shaders are not making efficient use of the GPU hardware, but similar issues could apply for vertex and tessellation shaders too, just because there is a need for pushing data through multiple pipeline stages. This can result in memory traffic and allocation bottlenecks between geometry and pixel stages.
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The Vulkan and DX12 graphics devices now support bindless descriptors in Wicked Engine. Earlier and in DX11, it was only possible to access textures, buffers (resource descriptors) and samplers in the shaders by binding them to specific slots. First, the binding model limitations will be described briefly, then the bindless model will be discussed.
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Variable Rate Shading (VRS) is a new DX12 feature introduced recently, that can be used to control shading rate. To be more precise, it is used to reduce shading rate, as opposed to the Multi Sampling Anti Aliasing (MSAA) technique which is used to increase it.
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One way to optimize heavy post processing shaders is to determine which parts of the screen could use a simpler version. The simplest form of this is use branching in the shader code to early exit or switch to a variant with reduced sample count or computations. This comes with a downside that even the parts where early exit occur, must allocate as many hardware resources (registers or groupshared memory) as the heaviest path. Also, branching in the shader code can be expensive when the branch condition is not uniform (for example: constant buffer values or SV_GroupID are uniform, but texture coordinates or SV_DispatchThreadID are not), because multiple threads can potentially branch differently and cause divergence in execution and additional instructions.
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