846842 - (gl-thread) Offload OpenGL commands to a dedicated GL thread

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1607940

(Core :: Graphics: CanvasWebGL, enhancement)

Description

[Kelsey Gilbert [:jgilbert]]

We're seeing non-trivial overhead for GL calls in WebGL-heavy demos. One way to help with this is to do the actual GL calls on a different thread, synchronizing as necessary.

Most GL commands can be async, while others (bufferData, texImage2D) should often be sync.

Comment 1

[Jeff Muizelaar [:jrmuizel]]

(In reply to Jeff Gilbert [:jgilbert] from comment #0)
> We're seeing non-trivial overhead for GL calls in WebGL-heavy demos. One way
> to help with this is to do the actual GL calls on a different thread,
> synchronizing as necessary.
> 
> Most GL commands can be async, while others (bufferData, texImage2D) should
> often be sync.

FWIW, some OpenGL stacks already support this. i.e. on OS X you can opt in and on mesa there are patches to add support.

Comment 2

[Kelsey Gilbert [:jgilbert]]

Great, sounds like we should try those out as well. Doing it ourselves provides a couple other potential advantages, but more immediate solutions (for even a subset of platforms) could be quite useful.