hey ronan,
...here's the specifics of a discussion I had with some guys about the Cg/ATI/ARB problems...I know it's a little long, but I think there's some good info here for all of us to consider regarding the issues...
l8r, jamie
Begin forwarded message:
From: Chris Bentley chrisb@ati.com Date: June 28, 2004 10:32:01 AM EDT To: mac-opengl@lists.apple.com Cc: mgix@apple.com Subject: Re: Cg runtime and fragment programs
Hi,
Here are Dan Gessel's comments:
Our initial ARB FP implementation was designed with the assumption that programs would be written to the parse, or non-native, limits. These were set to be close to, or, in some cases, less than the native limits (as we would hold back exporting resources that might be required to implement some ARB FP instructions which are not native to our HW).
Because of this, instruction re-ordering and merging of dependent phases (or indirections) was not a primary concern.
Specifically, we understand that Cg, focuses on minimizing temporaries, as it is apparently an important issue for Nvidia hardware; in contrast, "indirections" are limited on ATI HW.
Another aspect on our hardware is that fetches from texture rectangles require ALU ops to scale texture coordinates before the texture instruction can be issued, which, if the first instruction is a texture rect fetch, will introduce another "indirection".
Because Cg trades "indirections" for fewer temporaries, Cg generated code with fetches from texture rectangles will often fail on our early ARB FP compilers.
The 10.3.4 compiler is much improved from 10.3.3 and earlier, but is still designed for ARB FP programmers writing in "assembler", with an understanding of the HW limitations.
However, additional work on the compilers for upcoming hardware (with instruction space for significantly longer programs), has also come with much more aggressive optimization (including indirection aggregation).
Because the optimizers are more capable, we have enlarged the parse limits so that we have the best opportunity to execute any given program.
In particular, the program below can be executed on ATI HW using the latest beta drivers.
chrisb
On Jun 24, 2004, at 7:11 PM, Chris Bentley wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: mgix@apple.com [mailto:mgix@apple.com] Sent: Thursday, June 24, 2004 6:47 PM To: macopengl List Subject: Re: Cg runtime and fragment programs
Le 24 juin 04, ` 14:44, Pete Warden a icrit :
One other thing to note is that whilst the limits are tighter than NVidia's, the fragment programs we use run two to three times faster on ATI R3xx systems than the NV34.
Yes, on the R300 chips the limit is 64 alu instructions, and then there are also 32 texture instructions.
By the way Chris, when you mention '32 texture instructions', is there anyway to actually use that many TEX's without hitting the other limitations? We've managed to use 8 texture reads in a single program by using glMultiTexCoords() or other ways of generating the texture coordinates that don't trigger the indirection count, but doing any more than that fails.
Pete
On Thursday, June 24, 2004, at 01:53 PM, Chris Bentley wrote:
Hi,
If you're running on an ATI board, there are severe limitations to what you can actually execute on it:
Whether "severe" or not, yes there are indeed limitations... To inject a little actual data into this discussion, here are the limits:
I guess 'severe' was probably a bad choice of words :) There is indeed plenty of cool stuff you can do within the existing limits.
However, I'd like to add my 2 cents to Pete's comment : I am kind of surprised by the 32 texture instruction limit you mention: every time I write a pixel shader that uses more than about 8 taps, it either does not load or fails silently (black images).
I confess I did not explore the issue in depth, and I'm not sure what actual limit the shader hit (# of TEX instruction, ordering or other), but I do hit these limits real, real fast, especially with raw CG output.
To inject a little more data in the discussion, below is a specific example of an ARB shader that fails for me (I run on an R350, on OSX 10.3.4):
It has 7 texture taps, 14 ARB instructions, and seems to be within constraints, but fails to load : gl->getProgramivARB(GL_PROGRAM_UNDER_NATIVE_LIMITS_ARB) returns 0
One frustrating thing is that it is very hard to figure why the shader fails, and you end up having to spend lots of time just trying to move things about in the ARB instruction list just to get the driver to accept it.
It looks like it does fail simply because the instructions do not come in the order the driver expects.
If so, it would indeed be very nice if the driver could reorder them on the fly to fit the requirement of the chip rather than having the programmer do it by hand.
Especially if the HW constraint change with each chip generation.
!!ARBfp1.0 # ARB_fragment_program generated by NVIDIA Cg compiler # cgc version 1.2.0001, build date Feb 19 2004 10:51:06 # command line args: -I. -profile arbfp1 #vendor NVIDIA Corporation #version 1.0.02 #profile arbfp1 #program main #semantic main.tex0 : TEXUNIT0 #semantic main.w0 : C0 #semantic main.w1 : C1 #var samplerRECT tex0 : TEXUNIT0 : texunit 0 : 1 : 1 #var float4 w0 : C0 : c[0] : 6 : 1 #var float3 w1 : C1 : c[1] : 7 : 1 #var float4 color : $vout.COLOR : COL : 0 : 1 #var float4 tc0 : $vin.TEXCOORD0 : TEX0 : 2 : 1 #var float4 tc1 : $vin.TEXCOORD1 : TEX1 : 3 : 1 #var float4 tc2 : $vin.TEXCOORD2 : TEX2 : 4 : 1 #var float2 tc3 : $vin.TEXCOORD3 : TEX3 : 5 : 1 PARAM u0 = program.local[0]; PARAM u1 = program.local[1]; TEMP R0; TEMP R1; TEMP R2; TEX R0, fragment.texcoord[0].zwzz, texture[0], RECT; TEX R1, fragment.texcoord[0], texture[0], RECT; MUL R0, R0, u0.y; MAD R0, R1, u0.x, R0; TEX R1, fragment.texcoord[1], texture[0], RECT; TEX R2, fragment.texcoord[1].zwzz, texture[0], RECT; MAD R0, R1, u0.z, R0; MAD R0, R2, u0.w, R0; TEX R1, fragment.texcoord[2], texture[0], RECT; TEX R2, fragment.texcoord[2].zwzz, texture[0], RECT; MAD R0, R1, u1.x, R0; MAD R0, R2, u1.y, R0; TEX R1, fragment.texcoord[3], texture[0], RECT; MAD result.color, R1, u1.z, R0; END _______________________________________________ mac-opengl mailing list | mac-opengl@lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Archives: http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/mac-opengl Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
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James Tittle II