The documentation indicates that this "allocates" storage for a texture and its levels. The pseudocode provided seems to indicate that this is for the mipmap levels.
How does usage of glTexStorage relate to glGenerateMipmap? glTexStorage seems to "lock" a texture's storage size. It seems to me this would only serve to make things less flexible. Are there meant to be performance gains to be had here?
It's pretty new and only available in 4.2 so I'm going to try to avoid using it, but I'm confused because its description makes it sound kind of important.
How is storage for textures managed in earlier GL versions? When i call glTexImage2D I effectively erase and free the storage previously associated with the texture handle, yes? and generating mipmaps also automatically handles storage for me as well.
I remember using the old-school glTexSubImage2D method to implement OpenGL 2-style render-to-texture to do some post-process effects in my previous engine experiment. It makes sense that glTexStorage will bring about a more sensible way of managing texture-related resources, now that we have better ways to do RTT.
To understand what glTexStorage does, you need to understand what the glTexImage* functions do.
glTexImage2D does three things:
It allocates OpenGL storage for a specific mipmap layer, with a specific size. For example, you could allocate a 64x64 2D image as mipmap level 2.
It sets the internal format for the mipmap level.
It uploads pixel data to the texture. The last step is optional; if you pass NULL as the pointer value (and no buffer object is bound to GL_PIXEL_UNPACK_BUFFER), then no pixel transfer takes place.
Creating a mipmapped texture by hand requires a sequence of glTexImage calls, one for each mipmap level. Each of the sizes of the mipmap levels needs to be the proper size based on the previous level's size.
Now, if you look at section 3.9.14 of the GL 4.2 specification, you will see two pages of rules that a texture object must follow to be "complete". A texture object that is incomplete cannot be accessed from.
Among those rules are things like, "mipmaps must have the appropriate size". Take the example I gave above: a 64x64 2D image, which is mipmap level 2. It would be perfectly valid OpenGL code to allocate a mipmap level 1 that used a 256x256 texture. Or a 16x16. Or a 10x345. All of those would be perfectly functional as far as source code is concerned. Obviously they would produce nonsense as a texture, since the texture would be incomplete.
Again consider the 64x64 mipmap 2. I create that as my first image. Now, I could create a 128x128 mipmap 1. But I could also create a 128x129 mipmap 1. Both of these are completely consistent with the 64x64 mipmap level 2 (mipmap sizes always round down). While they are both consistent, they're also both different sizes. If a driver has to allocate the full mipmap chain at once (which is entirely possible), which size does it allocate? It doesn't know. It can't know until you explicitly allocate the rest.
Here's another problem. Let's say I have a texture with a full mipmap chain. It is completely texture complete, according to the rules. And then I call glTexImage2D on it again. Now what? I could accidentally change the internal format. Each mipmap level has a separate internal format; if they don't all agree, then the texture is incomplete. I could accidentally change the size of the texture, again making the texture incomplete.
glTexStorage prevents all of these possible errors. It creates all the mipmaps you want up-front, given the base level's size. It allocates all of those mipmaps with the same image format, so you can't screw that up. It makes the texture immutable, so you can't come along and try to break the texture with a bad glTexImage2D call. And it prevents other errors I didn't even bother to cover.
The question isn't "what does glTexStorage do?" The question is "why did we go so long without it."
glTexStorage has no relation to glGenerateMipmap; they are orthogonal functionality. glTexStorage does exactly what it says: it allocates texture storage space. It does not fill that space with anything. So it creates a texture with a given size filled with uninitialized data. Much like glRenderbufferStorage allocates a renderbuffer with a given size filled with uninitialized data. If you use glTexStorage, you need to upload data with glTexSubImage (since glTexImage is forbidden on an immutable texture).
glTexStorage creates space for mipmaps. glGenerateMipmap creates the mipmap data itself (the smaller versions of the base layer). It can also create space for mipmaps if that space doesn't already exist. They're used for two different things.
Before calling glGenerateMipmap​, the base mipmap level must be established. (either with mutable or immutable storage).so...,you can using glTexImage2D+glGenerateMipmap only,more simple!
Related
Is there a way to directly (i.e., not a copy or a fill) supply data to a texture with immutable storage that isn't glTexSubImage*? I know there might not be an actual need for a separate function to fulfill this role, but I do wonder why you can't specify the data in the same line you allocate your memory (in the same manner as immutable buffer objects).
I do wonder why you can't specify the data in the same line you allocate your memory (in the same manner as immutable buffer objects).
Textures are far more complex than buffer objects.
The immutable storage APIs for textures allocate all of the specified mipmap levels for that texture. However, the various pixel transfer functions only ever upload, at most, a single mipmap level's worth of pixel data in a single operation. There is no provision in any pixel transfer operation to transfer more than a single mipmap level of data. Indeed, the process of pixel transferring only makes sense with a single image of a given dimensionality (array textures are considered treated as a higher-dimensional image). Mipmap levels change their size from layer to layer, which makes the pixel transfer operation change its meaning. Particularly with regard to some of the pixel transfer parameters like sub-image selectors.
So if you're uploading to a texture with multiple mipmaps, you're going to need to make multiple calls anyway. So what's one more?
Furthermore, note that glTexImage* and glCompressedTexImage* take different parameters. The former takes pixel data via pixel transfer functionality, and the latter takes pre-compressed data. But they both allocate storage. If you're going to make glTexStorage* more analogous to glTexImage*, then you have to also add glCompressedTexStorage*. So now you have another series of functions, and the only difference is what kind of upload they do.
By contrast, buffers only contain a single array of bytes, and there's only one way to upload to them.
Overall, it's better to just use the existing SubImage infrastructure for uploading, and have allocation be entirely separate from that.
I recently re-wrote some code to use Shader Storage Buffer Object in OpenGL, to send in dynamic sized arrays into GLSL, vastly increasing performance when drawing many procedurally generated objects.
What I have is a couple of thousand points, and for each point I render a procedurally generated circular billboard. Each one can in turn have different colors and radius, as well as a few other characteristics (represented as bools or enums)
I fill a vector with these positions, packed together with the radius and color. Then I upload it as a Shader Storage Buffer Object with dynamic size. I create a dummy VAO, containing 0 vbos, but call the draw command with the same amount of points that I have.
Inside the shader, I then iterate through this array, using the gl_VertexID, and generate a quad (two triangles) with texture coordinates, for each point.
I'm looking for a way of doing the same in Vulkan. Is there some way in Vulkan, to pass a dynamic sized array into a shader? Reading about Shader Storage Buffer objects in Graham Seller's Vulkan book, it only mentions them being read-write, but not capable of dynamically sized arrays.
Edit: It seems that storage buffers are in fact capable of dynamic sized arrays, based on Sasha Willems particle example. Is there a way of doing the same thing via uniforms?
I may be misunderstanding your question. SSBOs have identical behavior and functionality between the two APIs. That's why they're named the same. An unbounded array at the end of a storage block will have its length defined at runtime, based on what data you provide.
The size of a buffer descriptor is not hard coded into the descriptor set layout; it's something you set with VkWriteDescriptorSet. Now unlike the offset, you cannot change a descriptor set's size without changing the descriptor itself. That is, you don't have an equivalent to vkCmdBindDescriptorSets's pDynamicOffsets field. So you have to actually update the descriptor in-situ to change the length.
But that just requires double-buffering your descriptor set; it shouldn't be a problem.
Is there a way of doing the same thing via uniforms?
Again, the answer is the same for Vulkan as for OpenGL: no.
I want to write to a particular texture mipmap level. The problem is that OpenGL says "GL_FRAMEBUFFER_INCOMPLETE_ATTACHMENT​" and "Framebuffer is not completed" if I don't generate the mipmaps before(glGenerateMipmap(GL_TEXTURE_2D);).
Generating the mipmaps before writing to them works, but it is an stupid performance cost since the automatically generated mipmap levels would never be used.
Is it possible to avoid this?
Note: I know that not writing directly to the levels and calling glGenerateMipmaps is faster, but I need to do this.
It seems like you simply did not create the storage for the mipmap level you tried to render to, glTexImage[n]D() does not do that - it only creates a storage for one single mipmap level. You need to separately creaet each mipmap level separately. glGenerateMipmaps does this implicitely. However, you only actually need a tiny bit of what it does, so it is better to avoid it here. Your best option is to create the mipmap chain from level 0 to the level you need manually.
With really modern GL, I would recommend you use immutable texures from GL_ARB_texture_storage. The glTexStorage() function allows creating the storage for all required mipmap levels in a single call. With immutable textures, you can still change the content any time, the only thing you can't is creating new data storage (with potentially different formats or sizes), so you can't repeatedly call glTexImage[n]D() on such texture object. However, you still can delete the whole object and create a new one, if the need arises.
We use buffer objects for reducing copy operations from CPU-GPU and for texture buffer objects we can change target from vertex to texture in buffer objects. Is there any other advantage here of texture buffer objects? Also, it does not allow filtering, is there any disadvantage of this?
A buffer texture is similar to a 1D-texture but has a backing buffer store that's not part of the texture object (in contrast to any other texture object) but realized with an actual buffer object bound to TEXTURE_BUFFER. Using a buffer texture has several implications and, AFAIK, one use-case that can't be mapped to any other type of texture.
Note that a buffer texture is not a buffer object - a buffer texture is merely associated with a buffer object using glTexBuffer.
By comparison, buffer textures can be huge. Table 23.53 and following of the core OpenGL 4.4 spec defines a minimum maximum (i.e. the minimal value that implementations must provide) number of texels MAX_TEXTURE_BUFFER_SIZE. The potential number of texels being stored in your buffer object is computed as follows (as found in GL_ARB_texture_buffer_object):
floor(<buffer_size> / (<components> * sizeof(<base_type>))
The resulting value clamped to MAX_TEXTURE_BUFFER_SIZE is the number of addressable texels.
Example:
You have a buffer object storing 4MiB of data. What you want is a buffer texture for addressing RGBA texels, so you choose an internal format RGBA8. The addressable number of texels is then
floor(4MiB / (4 * sizeof(UNSIGNED_BYTE)) == 1024^2 texels == 2^20 texels
If your implementation supports this number, you can address the full range of values in your buffer object. The above isn't too impressive and can simply be achieved with any other texture on current implementations. However, the machine on which I'm writing this answer supports 2^28 == 268435456 texels.
With OpenGL 4.4 (and 4.3 and possibly with earlier 4.x versions), the MAX_TEXTURE_SIZE is 2 ^ 16 texels per 1D-texture, so a buffer texture can still be 4 times as large. On my local machine I can allocate a 2GiB buffer texture (even larger actually), but only a 1GiB 1D-texture when using RGBAF32 texels.
A use-case for buffer textures is random (and atomic, if desired) read-/write-access (the latter via image load/store) to a large data store inside a shader. Yes, you can do random read-access on arrays of uniforms inside one or multiple blocks but it get's very tedious if you have to process a lot of data and have to work with multiple blocks and even then, looking at the maximum combined size of all uniform components (where a single float component has a size of 4 bytes) in all uniform blocks for a single stage,
MAX_(stage)_UNIFORM_BLOCKS *
MAX_UNIFORM_BLOCK_SIZE +
MAX_(stage)_UNIFORM_COMPONENTS * 4
isn't really a lot of space to work with in a shader stage (depending on how large your implementation allows the above number to be).
An important difference between textures and buffer textures is that the data store, as a regular buffer object, can be used in operations where a texture simply does not work. The extension mentions:
The use of a buffer object to provide storage allows the texture data to
be specified in a number of different ways: via buffer object loads
(BufferData), direct CPU writes (MapBuffer), framebuffer readbacks
(EXT_pixel_buffer_object extension). A buffer object can also be loaded
by transform feedback (NV_transform_feedback extension), which captures
selected transformed attributes of vertices processed by the GL. Several
of these mechanisms do not require an extra data copy, which would be
required when using conventional TexImage-like entry points.
An implication of using buffer textures is that look-ups inside a shader can only be done via texelFetch. Buffer textures also aren't mip-mapped and, as you already mentioned, during fetches there is no filtering.
Addendum:
Since OpenGL 4.3, we have what is called a
Shader Storage Buffer. These too provide random (atomic) read-/write-access to a large data store but don't need to be accessed with texelFetch() or image load/store functions as is the case for buffer textures. Using buffer textures also implies having to deal with gvec4 return values, both with texelFetch() and imageLoad() / imageStore(). This becomes very tedious as soon as you want to work with structures (or arrays thereof) and you don't want to think of some stupid packing scheme using multiple instances of vec4 or using multiple buffer textures to achieve something similar. With a buffer accessed as shader storage, you can simple index into the data store and pull one or more instances of some struct {} directly from the buffer.
Also, since they are very similar to uniform blocks, using them should be fairly straight forward - if you know how to use uniform buffers, you don't have a long way to go learn how to use shader storage buffers.
It's also absolutely worth browsing the Issues section of the corresponding ARB extension.
Performance Implications
Daniel Rakos did some performance analysis years ago, both as a comparison of uniform buffers and buffer textures, and also on a little more general note based on information from AMD's OpenCL programming guide. There is now a very recent version, specifically targeting OpenCL optimization an AMD platforms.
There are many factors influencing performance:
access patterns and resulting caching behavior
cache line sizes and memory layou
what kind of memory is accessed (registers, local, global, L1/L2 etc.) and its respective memory bandwidth
how well memory fetching latency is hidden by doing something else in the meantime
what kind of hardware you're on, i.e. a dedicated graphics card with dedicated memory or some unified memory architecture
etc., etc.
As always when worrying about performance: implement something that works and see if that solutions is fast enough for your needs. Otherwise, implement two or more approaches to solving the problem, profile them and compare.
Also, vendor specific guides can offer a great deal of insight. The above mentioned OpenCL user and optimization guides provide a high-level architectural perspective and specific hints on how to optimize your CL kernels - stuff that's also relevant when developing shaders.
A one use case I have found was to store per primitive attributes (accessed in the fragment shader with help of gl_PrimitiveID) while still maintaining unique vertices in the indexed mesh.
I do update to a texture2D in OpenGL 4.0 using gltexSubImage2D().The texture has mipmaps auto generated using
glGenerateMipmap(GL_TEXTURE_2D);
My texture update was failing till I understood I had to regenerate mipmaps on update too (or remove mipmaps generation).Then I read this wiki where there is a usage of glTexStorage2D when generating mipmaps.I actually never paid attention to this method.So I wonder if I have to use it every time I generate a texture with mipmaps?
Update :
I see from the method specs that it
specifies the storage requirements for all levels
of a two-dimensional texture or one-dimensional texture array simultaneously
I guess using it should improve the performance when generating mipmaps?Is it true?
The two functions are completely orthogonal.
The choice is between glTexImage2D and glTexStorage2D. Both of these allocate storage for texture images; they just do it in different ways.
glTexImage2D is the old way of allocating storage. It creates mutable storage (there are other functions that create mutable storage too). If you want mipmaps, you have to allocate each mipmap level with a separate call to the function, manually computing the size of the mipmap image (see below for the exception to this).
glTexStorage2D allocates immutable storage for the image data. It allocates all of the mipmaps you want all at once.
Immutable storage, as the name suggests, cannot be changed. See, you can call glTexImage2D on the same mipmap level, with a different size. And if you do, OpenGL will destroy the original mipmap level and allocate storage for the new one. You can even change formats.
Immutable storage won't let you change any of that. You can upload new data, using functions like glTexSubImage2D. But those functions don't change the storage; they change the contents.
glTexImage2D and glTexStorage2D are like malloc. glTexSubImage2D is like memcpy; it only works for existing memory.
glGenerateMipmap is a function that will take the base layer of a texture and generate the data for all of the mipmaps from that base layer (given the mipmap range). It does this one time. Think of it like a rendering function; it does its job and then it's done.
For mutable storage textures, glGenerateMipmap will also allocate storage for any mipmaps in the mipmap range that were not previously allocated. That's why you can call glTexImage2D once, then call glGenerateMipmap to force it to make all of the other mipmaps without having to do it manually.
Before there was glTexStorage, each mipmap level had to be initialized by a separate call to glTexImage. glTexImage triggers a lot of complex internal state changes, which are rather expensive. Every time glTexImage is called, the layout of the texture object is altered.
Hence you try to avoid using it, if possible. As you discovered, you must first initialize all desired mipmap levels before you can update them by glTexSubImage. glGenerateMipmap will create them, which introduce layout changes, which is, yes, expensive.
glTexStorage initializes the whole texture object once for a desired, immutable format. Yes, using glTexStorage improves performance when used together wigh glGenerateMipmap or data updates by glTexSubImage, but the improvements happen very early at texture object creation, and not so much when its data is changed.