1675590 - (sw-wr-perf-gradient) Improve radial gradient performance in swgl

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Graphics: WebRender, defect)

Description

[Jeff Muizelaar [:jrmuizel]]

Radial gradient are always going to be hard on the CPU. We might be able to do better, but we should try to avoid having to draw them whenever possible too.

Comment 1

[Glenn Watson [:gw]]

We don't currently have a fast path for radial gradients (or conic gradients). For linear gradients, we draw a small gradient that we persist to the texture cache. This is then drawn in the main scene as an image with the assistance of the GPU scaling / filtering hardware. We should do something similar for radial gradients. There are a few complexities with things like hard stops, but it should be easy to handle the common cases at lease.

Comment 2

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

Hey Nical, Lee thought you might be able to help here once we get the texture work landed.

Comment 3

[Nicolas Silva [:nical]]

Keeping the needinfo as a reminder. I want to investigate bug 1681339 first (unless someone else beats me to it), I can look into this one afterward.

Comment 4

[Lee Salzman [:lsalzman]]

Attachment: Bug 1675590 - use the opaque gradient brush shader when no other features are required. r?nical

Comment 5

[Lee Salzman [:lsalzman]]

For right now it looks like many of the test cases use 3 or more gradient stops, so writing a simple fast-path that just deals with 2-stop gradients wouldn't have helped in these situations. However, it looks like a lot of these same test-cases use transparent colors in their stops and cause us to punt to the alpha-pass shader for gradients. This alpha-pass shader does everything including clip masking, anti-aliasing, and repetitions, which is expensive if none of those features are necessary. So as an experiment I am putting up an initial patch that seems to help with some of those cases, that if a gradient was punted to the alpha-pass only because of a transparent stop, but not because of needing any of those features, it will instead revert to using the opaque shader even though there is a blend mode active, which should alleviate some of the overhead.

Comment 6

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/ea7f2589547c
use the opaque gradient brush shader when no other features are required. r=nical

Comment 7

[Natalia Csoregi [:nataliaCs]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/ea7f2589547c

Comment 8

[Lee Salzman [:lsalzman]]

Attachment: Bug 1675590 - avoid using alpha-pass version of gradient shader for clip-mask-only cases. r?jrmuizel

Comment 9

[Lee Salzman [:lsalzman]]

Attachment: Bug 1675590 - implement provisional fast-paths for linear and radial gradients. r?jrmuizel

Comment 10

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/0d0bce9329de
implement provisional fast-paths for linear and radial gradients. r=jrmuizel

Comment 11

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/42791e22621d
avoid using alpha-pass version of gradient shader for clip-mask-only cases. r=jrmuizel

Comment 12

[Sandor Molnar[:smolnar]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/0d0bce9329de
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/42791e22621d

Comment 13

[Florin Strugariu [:Bebe]]

== Change summary for alert #28553 (as of Thu, 28 Jan 2021 07:09:11 GMT) ==

Improvements:

Ratio	Suite	Test	Platform	Options	Absolute values (old vs new)
4%	raptor-tp6-microsoft-firefox-cold	fcp	windows10-64-shippable-qr	nocondprof webrender	557.83 -> 538.17
3%	raptor-tp6-microsoft-firefox-cold	fcp	windows10-64-shippable-qr	nocondprof webrender	554.25 -> 538.00

For up to date results, see: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/alerts?id=28553

Comment 14

[Alexandru Ionescu (needinfo me) [:alexandrui]]

== Change summary for alert #28555 (as of Thu, 28 Jan 2021 18:52:08 GMT) ==

Improvements:

Ratio	Suite	Test	Platform	Options	Absolute values (old vs new)
68%	rasterflood_gradient		linux64-shippable-qr	e10s stylo webrender-sw	269.33 -> 453.17
61%	rasterflood_gradient		windows10-64-shippable-qr	e10s stylo webrender-sw	251.08 -> 405.33
55%	rasterflood_gradient		macosx1014-64-shippable-qr	e10s stylo webrender-sw	229.92 -> 356.58

For up to date results, see: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/perfherder/alerts?id=28555

Comment 15

[Lee Salzman [:lsalzman]]

It seems that the interventions I made in this bug resulted in significant enough improvements in gradient performance that it is reasonable to close out this bug for now. It might be possible to make further improvements to gradient performance in the future if necessary via even more specialized fast-paths, but those would be better addressed as a follow-up bug rather than continuing to overload this bug.