计算WebGL中的uniforms变量使用数

在使用Three.js为人体模型加载皮肤材料时，启用了skinning:true的参数。

有时候会导致GL编译错误，提示“too many uniforms”。下面的文章有助于理解错误原因和检测uniforms的使用情况。

For a recent consulting project I was attempting to render some fairly complex skeletal animations in WebGL on Firefox and Chrome. I quickly ran into a situation where the animation was rendering on Linux and Mac computers, but not on Windows. All the test machines had up-to-date graphics drivers, but the Windows machines threw a “too many uniforms” error when attempting to link the shader programs. So what does this error mean, and how do we fix it? In this post I’ll share the results of my research that allowed me to get everything working.

Uniforms

So what is a uniform? According to the OpenGL wiki, a uniform is “a global GLSL variable declared with the ‘uniform’ storage qualifier.” To be a little more specific: your shader executes on the GPU, which is physically distinct from the rest of the computer, separated by a bus. This means there’s a very limited amount of data that can be shared quickly between the GPU and your web browser. A uniform variable is what lets you declare “this is data that is exposed externally for transport over the bus”, and there’s a specific API on the JavaScript/WebGL side that lets you get and set this data. For example, you might declare the following variables at the start of a GLSL vertex shader:

    uniform mat4 uMVMatrix;
    uniform mat4 uPMatrix;
    uniform vec3 someVector;
    varying vec4 vColor;

That shader has, you guessed it, three uniforms. Later, in your JavaScript program code, you might access, transform, and return one of the uniforms like this:

    // get a copy of our vec3 uniform
    var vec3Uni = gl.getUniformLocation(shaderProgram, "someVector");
    // increment the x component of the vector by 10
    vec3Uni[0] += 10;
    // write it back to the GPU
    gl.uniform3fv(shaderProgram, vec3Uni);

If you’ve ever used web workers, this data flow should be familiar to you. This is for good reason: we’re simply doing parallel computing here, but instead of the shader code running on a spawned worker thread, it’s running on the GPU.

How Many is Too Many?

So, we know what a uniform is: it’s data that’s transferred back and forth between the GPU. Because the GPU is physically distinct from the rest of the computer, we are severely limited in the amount of data that we can quickly push back and forth over the bus between the CPU and the GPU. So we need to watch our uniform usage very closely, and we need to understand that different combinations of graphics cards and graphics drivers allow for different uniform caps.

When it seems like I’m hitting a performance limit, the first thing I do is benchmark my system. Fortunately, webgl-bench is a great website that can benchmark your WebGL performance in seconds, giving you a lot of statistics that can be valuable for debugging. For this problem in particular, we’re interested in the value returned forMAX_VERTEX_UNIFORM_VECTORS. As you might imagine, having more active uniforms than the maximum is what causes a “too many uniforms” error.

Running the benchmark on Mac, Linux, and Windows machines highlighted something odd: while most of the Mac and Linux machines capped out at 1024 uniforms, the Windows computers supported only 256 vertex uniforms, even if they had amazing graphics cards and the latest drivers.

This is due to a peculiarity in how Chrome and Firefox render WebGL. In Mac and Linux, the browsers render WebGL directly, using native OpenGL drivers. The problem on Windows is that the native OpenGL drivers are notoriously unstable, causing sometimes massive performance hits. To avoid these problems, the Windows versions of both browsers default to using ANGLE, which translates OpenGL ES 2.0 API calls to DirectX 9 or DirectX 11 API calls.

(Frank Olivier of the IE GPU team informs me that IE11 WebGL supports more than 256 vertex uniforms because it’s already using the DX11 runtime.)

The problem is that the ANGLE configuration currently used by both browsers uses DirectX 9. The DX9 configuration imposes an artificial cap of 256 vertex uniforms in use at any given time, no matter how good the graphics card is. Users can manually disable ANGLE (more info here) but it’s an onerous process only meant for developers; you can’t expect an end user to do it.

Fortunately, an upcoming Chrome release (version 34 or possibly earlier) is going to default to using DirectX 11, which should increase the cap to 1024 maximum vertex uniforms. You can follow the tracking issue for this feature here. Firefox is actively looking into doing the same, but they don’t have a timetable yet.

Counting the Uniforms

So now I needed to figure out how many uniforms I was using with my complex model. Obviously I was using more than 256, but exactly how many more?

For simple shaders you can manually count the number of uniforms by visually inspecting your script. But for most combinations of shaders and dynamic scenes, it’s likely that the number of uniforms in use will scale with the complexity and the number of the models being rendered. We need to dynamically count the active uniforms.

After a bunch of research, I wrote a function does this for you. You pass it a shader program and it returns an object containing useful data.

Here’s the code for the function:

function getProgramInfo(gl, program) {
    var result = {
        attributes: [],
        uniforms: [],
        attributeCount: 0,
        uniformCount: 0
    },
        activeUniforms = gl.getProgramParameter(program, gl.ACTIVE_UNIFORMS),
        activeAttributes = gl.getProgramParameter(program, gl.ACTIVE_ATTRIBUTES);

    // Taken from the WebGl spec:
    // http://www.khronos.org/registry/webgl/specs/latest/1.0/#5.14
    var enums = {
        0x8B50: 'FLOAT_VEC2',
        0x8B51: 'FLOAT_VEC3',
        0x8B52: 'FLOAT_VEC4',
        0x8B53: 'INT_VEC2',
        0x8B54: 'INT_VEC3',
        0x8B55: 'INT_VEC4',
        0x8B56: 'BOOL',
        0x8B57: 'BOOL_VEC2',
        0x8B58: 'BOOL_VEC3',
        0x8B59: 'BOOL_VEC4',
        0x8B5A: 'FLOAT_MAT2',
        0x8B5B: 'FLOAT_MAT3',
        0x8B5C: 'FLOAT_MAT4',
        0x8B5E: 'SAMPLER_2D',
        0x8B60: 'SAMPLER_CUBE',
        0x1400: 'BYTE',
        0x1401: 'UNSIGNED_BYTE',
        0x1402: 'SHORT',
        0x1403: 'UNSIGNED_SHORT',
        0x1404: 'INT',
        0x1405: 'UNSIGNED_INT',
        0x1406: 'FLOAT'
    };

    // Loop through active uniforms
    for (var i=0; i < activeUniforms; i++) {
        var uniform = gl.getActiveUniform(program, i);
        uniform.typeName = enums[uniform.type];
        result.uniforms.push(uniform);
        result.uniformCount += uniform.size;
    }

    // Loop through active attributes
    for (var i=0; i < activeAttributes; i++) {
        var attribute = gl.getActiveAttrib(program, i);
        attribute.typeName = enums[attribute.type];
        result.attributes.push(attribute);
        result.attributeCount += attribute.size;
    }

    return result;
}

It returns an object containing the following data:

• uniformCount – the total number of currently active uniforms in this program

• uniforms – an array containing the name, size, type, and typeName of the each active uniform. In particular, typeName can be useful since otherwise you’d have to look up the integer type value and cross reference it to the enum declarations in the webGL spec

• attributeCount, attributes – same as above, but for attributes (attributes are out of scope for this article, but are similarly capped and nice to keep count of)

Here’s some sample output using console.table (more info on that function here) to show the information from the returned object’s uniforms array. This is data from my original, complex model:

Looking at this I was able to immediately discern that we had 288 active vertex uniforms, and most of them were in the joint matrix (aka the complexity of our model’s skeleton). This helped me tell our artist that we needed to reduce the number of joints in the model by about 20% for it to work on Windows machines.

原文链接：

https://bocoup.com/weblog/counting-uniforms-in-webgl