[Interest] 60FPS and FBO

Samuel Rødal samuel.rodal at digia.com
Fri Nov 30 13:33:35 CET 2012


On 11/27/2012 10:39 AM, Thomas Senyk wrote:
> On Tue, November 27, 2012 10:12:58 Samuel Rødal wrote:
>> On 11/26/2012 05:50 PM, Thomas Senyk wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> the context of this is mail is:
>>>    - scenegraph
>>>    - FBO based effects
>>>    (plain shader-effects, qtgraphicaleffects, qt3d)
>>>    - embedded hardware / opengl es 2.0
>>>
>>> I've noticed that on a lot of embedded systems the FPS drops rather
>>> drastically (e.g. from 60 to 30 with one effect, from 30 to 10-15 with two
>>> effects) when using FBO based effects.
>>>
>>>     ... even simple effects, sometimes even if they have 'visible: false'
>>>
>>> Is this somewhat expected?
>>> It does sound like a vsync vs. fbo problem ... doesn't it?
>>> Is this a fault/bug in the embedded opengl drivers?
>>
>> As Florian also commented I've noticed that the FPS very easily drops to
>> 30 when not using the threaded renderer.
>>
>> But even if that's not the case, I guess FBOs can be heavy on the GPU,
>> especially if they're large (screen sized) as it basically implies
>> another full-screen render pass, plus some synchronization overhead
>> depending on the architecture; when rendering to the main framebuffer
>> some GPUs have a deep pipeline of several frames being in flight at the
>> same time, this pipeline might not be possible to utilize for FBOs since
>> the result of rendering to the FBO is typically used quite immediately
>> for rendering into another FBO or the main framebuffer. An interesting
>> experiment might be to do double buffering by keeping two FBOs and only
>> using the FBO that was rendered to during the last frame as a source
>> during the current frame. That would mean the FBO content and non-FBO
>> content would not be completely in sync though (unless you used
>> predictive timing for the FBO content or introduced extra latency). It
>> would have significant implications for memory use and its effectiveness
>> would depend highly on the driver and GPU architecture.
>>
>> I would be surprised if rendering to an FBO involved a vsync, since
>> there's no eglSwapBuffers() call involved in the process. You simply
>> bind an FBO, render to it, release it, and use it as a texture (this
>> step is where you get the synchronization hit).
>>
>>> Did anyone ever had a setup, using one or multiple FBO based effects did
>>> still result in 60fps? (as it should be for simple(!) effects?)
>>
>> At least on the Raspberry Pi I believe I've gotten 60 fps performance
>> out of ShaderEffects on ShaderEffectItems or layers. Not sure they were
>> fullscreen though.
>>
>> There are some general tricks you can use to get better performance when
>> using ShaderEffects:
>>
>> If you're applying effects on a sub-tree that is not animating, and the
>> ShaderEffect involves some heavy fragment program computation (such as a
>> nice blur effect), you can trade memory for performance by caching the
>> result of the ShaderEffect in a texture. This can be done simply by
>> setting "layer.enabled: true" on the ShaderEffect. Careful though, if
>> the sub-tree that is a source for the shader effect _is_ animating, this
>> will instead cause a drop in performance since the layer would need to
>> be updated each frame.
>>
>> In some cases you might get away with applying the effect at a lower
>> level in the Item hierarchy, for example instead of applying an effect
>> on a Rectangle that contains a rotating Image, separate the effect into
>> two components, one that applies to the Rectangle and one that applies
>> to the Image, cache the result of applying the effect to the image with
>> the "layer.enabled: true", and apply the rotation animation on the
>> effect instead of the source Image. This assumes that the effect is
>> rotation independent though, for example if it's doing a pure color
>> transform (gray-scale or sepia etc). Of course, even better would be to
>> have a PNG with the effect pre-applied :)
>>
>> In general, shader effects or not, you can always use "layer.enabled:
>> true" on non-animating sub-trees to trade memory for performance.

And of course, if two recursive effects can be combined into one, that's 
usually the right thing to do (although it might break encapsulation a bit).

> You should consider writing a blog entry about all the possibilities and risks
> of FBO ;) 'Using FBO based effects - Doing it right' :)

Maybe, if I get the time :) Would be useful to do some benchmarking etc 
as well in conjunction with the article to show the actual benefits.

--
Samuel




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