This should be the last place where new arrays were created in "render".
Chrome memory now seems stable.
Firefox still grows like mad, though this used to be like this also with other demos (simply setting random values to existing arrays does this).
Seems like Mozilla folks themselves struggle with this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11280278@N04/5363335103/in/photostream/
For the moment just things that are executed every frame in WebGLRenderer.render.
Continuing with quest to minimize creation of new data structures. Should instead create per class/object structures and just reuse them (as gman does in ThreeD). Main goal is to avoid annoying garbage collection pauses.
Let's hope it didn't break something (could be if some code was dependent on cloning of return values of "flatten" or "makeInvert3x3", though from what I checked these are just used to set typed arrays uniforms).
Testing on current examples didn't show any noticeable performance degradation when enabling / disabling culling for every object in every frame.
"FlipSided" property could be probably done in very similar way, just setting "gl.frontFace( gl.CCW )" or "gl.frontFace( gl.CW )"
For this had to extend WebGLRenderer a bit:
- MeshShaderMaterial now can take non-specific float array uniforms as "fv1"
(there is already "fv" type for array of 3-item-vectors, which probably should be renamed to "fv3" to be consistent)
- render method has yet another parameter "clear" for clearing newly set framebuffer (defaults to true).
This is a bit hackish but it seems necessary to control this somehow. I didn't manage to replicate
desired behavior just with autoClear.
- another dirty thing is accessing GL context from the application side:
renderer.context.disable( renderer.context.DEPTH_TEST );
This should be refactored somehow, wrapped in some API call.
Requires to turn off mipmapping to be able to use non-power of two texture.
Effect of texture size on performance is noticeable, also there is no antialiasing (default in Chrome is I think 4x multisampling).
So I guess full-screen postprocessing will be quite costly :(. That's the price of WebGL always running at full-blown high resolution.
This could be somehow mitigated by faking lower resolutions via smaller texture, though I guess it still wouldn't be the same as having lower resolution set by GPU driver (this is a major help with performance in games - I never run full 1680 x 1050).
Rendering proper 3d object into the texture uncovered another issue - framebuffer had to be cleared after switching.
Texture is still flipped :( (original scene has small red torus on the top)
This is proving to be rather tricky. Yet again I tried to handle image coordinate mess in a proper way (UNPACK_FLIP_Y_WEBGL as texture parameter and non-inverted UVs), fixing hacks across the codebase.
This did indeed help with render-to-texture flipping, but instead it created really ugly problems with both normal map and minecraft AO demos. So back to square one :(
Had to set viewport to make it work in OpenGL.
Also made it easier to see texture orientation in the example.
Now it's visible that there is indeed flipping. At least now it's consistent ;).
If you want to refresh VBOs (and thus have geometry changes reflected in renderer), you need to set dirty flags on geometry object.
There are separate flags for different buffers (as not always all buffers need to be updated and oh my is updating costly):
mesh.geometry.__dirtyVertices = true;
mesh.geometry.__dirtyNormals = true;
mesh.geometry.__dirtyUvs = true;
mesh.geometry.__dirtyTangents = true;
mesh.geometry.__dirtyElements = true;
That was quite tough feature, a lot of refactoring, yet performance is still quite bad :(
The biggest remaining bottleneck seems to be translation between Three.js internal data formats and buffers. I removed as much per-frame arrays creation as I could, but even just iterating through existing data and setting of values is still very costly. Also per-frame normals computation is expensive.
No need to stuff them in different bucket, line-specific stuff is anyway done in `renderBuffer` method.
This was prompted by starting with implementation of ParticleSystem. It would be unwieldy to handle three different buckets of objects / buffers.
Unfortunately performance issues are still there and now already trickled down also to dev channel :(
I wonder what they did - fps numbers look more or less ok, problem is more with subtle yet very annoying choppiness. Like if somewhere suddenly bandwidth / memory is getting trashed.
Also first time I noticed issues with stats widget in latest Chrome canary 10.0.624.0 / Chromium continuous build 10.0.629.0:
- it doesn't show in demos with mixed canvas / WebGL content (OBJ converter demo, lights test)
- simply just adding it can significantly decrease performance (OBJ converter demo is choppy when invisible stats element exists)
- in some demos it has different transparency (Walt cubemap demo)
Looks like with some Chrome update in last few days we hit some new compositing or 2d canvas issue (both OpenGL and ANGLE versions share the same issues).
astrodud
alteredq
Mr.doob
timk
Szymon Nowak
oosmoxiecode
Mr.doob
Alex Schworer