How to make OpenGL usage Vulkan like

In a previous blog post we have discussed the usage scenarios of Vulkan and OpenGL. Even if going Vulkan is not an option at the moment, its concepts do show where modern rendering architectures are heading. Literally translating a traditional OpenGL/state-machine based renderer to Vulkan is possible, but most likely ends up in lower performance. Here are some tips that will make a transition to Vulkan smoother and help to improve performance in OpenGL as well, many of which are also known as “AZDO” techniques.

renderer GPU time CPU time [ms] gl ubo range 2.8 5.6 gl ubo nv bindless 1.9 3.3 gl indexed tbo/ssbo multi draw indirect 1.1 0.4 gl ubo nv command list 1.0 0.01

OpenGL rendering statistics from a CAD scene benchmark. The cadscene sample was used to compare different rendering techniques in a scenario where state changes where minimized. The test draws around 44k objects which have only few triangles per object (typical CPU-limited scenario) and is not using hardware instancing. Renderers with the “ubo” tag pass object matrix and material information by binding UBO ranges. The “multi draw indirect” renderer has to use dynamic indexing into larger buffers to access the shader parameters per draw-call, which may not work as well for less simple data. These results show that very fast paths in OpenGL exist. With additional extensions those fast paths can become even more general purpose and similar to Vulkan.

Object Management

Vulkan follows an object-oriented design and we always manipulate objects directly with their handles.

ARB_direct_state_access (DSA), OpenGL 4.5 core, allows direct manipulation of objects (textures, buffers, fbos…) rather than the classic “bind to edit”. Using DSA makes object manipulation cleaner as it doesn’t affect the binding state used for rendering, therefore is also middleware friendly.

Within the rendering hot loop the new set of binding calls is encouraged, as they only affect rendering state: glBindBuffersBase / glBindBuffersRange for UNIFORM, SHADER_STORAGE, ATOMIC_COUNTER, TRANSFORM_FEEDBACK glBindVertexBuffer(s) glBindFramebuffer glBindTextures / glBindTextureUnit glBindBuffer would most likely only be used with the ELEMENT_ARRAY, DRAW_INDIRECT in the rendering loop



“Bind to Edit” can still be beneficial in the hot loop, for example when the same buffer is updated very often by glBufferSubData, or glUniforms for the active program are changed. In this case the “indirection” by passing the object handle, may cause additional work. Some of these functions may also be available under EXT_direct_state_access, the primary difference between ARB and EXT is that ARB requires the use of glCreate”Resource” rather than working from glGen”Resource” object handles.

Resource Management

ARB_buffer_storage (core 4.4) should be preferred over the classic glBufferData, as it gives better usage hints than glBufferData. Ideally the developer uses persistent mapped buffers for all buffers that he expects to for reading or writing access on the CPU. This would allow an identical workflow to Vulkan. We also encourage the use of few but rather large buffers as suggested in the memory management blog post.

(core 4.4) should be preferred over the classic glBufferData, as it gives better usage hints than glBufferData. Ideally the developer uses persistent mapped buffers for all buffers that he expects to for reading or writing access on the CPU. This would allow an identical workflow to Vulkan. We also encourage the use of few but rather large buffers as suggested in the memory management blog post. ARB_texture_storage (core 4.2) provides immutable textures whose definition is complete up-front. The classic glTexImage never “knew” how many mip-maps would actually be specified, often causing lazy allocation. glTextureStorage is the better alternative for the driver.

(core 4.2) provides immutable textures whose definition is complete up-front. The classic glTexImage never “knew” how many mip-maps would actually be specified, often causing lazy allocation. glTextureStorage is the better alternative for the driver. ARB_texture_view (core 4.3) introduced the concept of casting texture formats to different types as long as they have the same texel size. The developer can also use it as view on a sub-resource, for example individual texture layer or mipmap in an array texture. Similar to using larger buffers and sub-allocating from those, a developer could use texture arrays for popular dimensions and re-use individual layers. It is not as flexible as the Vulkan texture memory management, but it can reduce run-time texture creation costs.

Command Buffer / Faster Rendering

Even in a single-threaded scenario Vulkan’s command buffers provide efficient ways to render data: recording a command-buffer is faster than traditional OpenGL commands and command buffers can be re-used. In theory OpenGL’s display lists allow re-use, in practice they are only beneficial for a limited functionality. However, there is still some other ways to speed up rendering in OpenGL.

ARB_multi_draw_indirect (MDI), OpenGL 4.3 core, allows accelerating draw-call submission. Compared to instancing we can draw any sub-range of vertex/index-buffers. To make most use of this feature use the previous encouraged larger buffers for geometry data, as it will allow drawing many geometries at once via MDI. The MDI buffer can also be filled from different threads using persistent mapped memory, whose pointers are passed to threads that don’t need an OpenGL context. The buffer content does not have to be filled every frame, but can be re-used and even manipulated by the GPU directly, for example for level of detail or culling purposes.

NVIDIA provides various extensions to make the hot-loop faster

NV_command_list is the latest extension and comes closest to Vulkan’s command buffers and provides very fast ways to record and submit commands that are most common in the rendering hot-loop. Just like in Vulkan, it is possible to re-use those command-buffers as well.

We encourage you to have a look at the GTC presentation as well as samples on github. The draw-indirect like buffers encode tokens for typical binding state (UBO, VBO, EBO) and draw-calls as well as minor state changes such as front-face or viewport dimensions. Due to its binary nature it is the fastest way to record commands (can also be used threaded) and provides two alternate render modes, either as pre-compiled object, or interpreted data from buffer objects. Due to state inheritance and the ability to stitch sequences from arbitrary buffer addresses, it can actually be faster than Vulkan’s secondary command buffers.

Bindless Rendering the NV_command_list builds on top of previous extensions that improved the rendering hot-loop performance by using native GPU addresses, and therefore avoiding per-object handle lookups and validation. NV_uniform_buffer_unified_memory NV_vertex_buffer_unified_memory NV_shader_buffer_load/store The core OpenGL alternative to “bindless” is “binding less” by using large buffers and array textures and manually managing the sub-allocations. The bindless extensions let the driver still manage the allocations and objects, while avoiding some of the negatives at rendering time.



Multi-Threading

Threaded Validation and Submission is an optimization that NVIDIA’s OpenGL driver may use to off-load work on a dedicated thread. The application thread remains very fast in this scenario, and the OpenGL commands are forwarded for processing to the worker thread. Applications should avoid commands that need synchronization between the treads, such as glGets or map/unmap (prefer persistent mapped, or BufferSubData).

is an optimization that NVIDIA’s OpenGL driver may use to off-load work on a dedicated thread. The application thread remains very fast in this scenario, and the OpenGL commands are forwarded for processing to the worker thread. Applications should avoid commands that need synchronization between the treads, such as glGets or map/unmap (prefer persistent mapped, or BufferSubData). Bindless or Binding Less on NVIDIA drivers will also improve the performance in threaded shared OpenGL contexts. To ensure consistency of objects across the threads, the OpenGL driver has to use locks more conservatively. In Vulkan this is the application’s responsibility. Doing less binds means a reduction of the impact of these locks, with bindless we can further avoid them.

or on NVIDIA drivers will also improve the performance in threaded shared OpenGL contexts. To ensure consistency of objects across the threads, the OpenGL driver has to use locks more conservatively. In Vulkan this is the application’s responsibility. Doing less binds means a reduction of the impact of these locks, with bindless we can further avoid them. Persistent Mapped Buffers (ARB_buffer_storage, core 4.4) allow us to pass buffer pointers to threads for writing and not using OpenGL at all. This is useful for both raw data and commands being encoded for ARB_multi_draw_indirect or NV_command_list buffers.

OpenGL however does not provide many of the other explicit Vulkan features around threading, especially fast submission to the same graphics queue.

Shader Resource/Uniform Binding

OpenGL 4.3 explicit bindings are instructions inside GLSL that allow us to manage our bindings up-front. Vulkan’s bindings are also hard-coded with SPIR-V and Vulkan does not allow querying binding information, so preparing yourself for the management of this is mandatory. Vulkan supports faster bindings and shader changes when the bindings use increasing units. Low binding units should reflect data that is shared for many operations and shaders.

layout (location= 0 ) in vec3 attr_position; layout (binding= 1 ,std140) uniform objectInfo { mat4 worldMatrix; }; layout (binding= 0 ) uniform samplerCube envCube; layout (binding= 1 ) uniform sampler2D objectLightmap;

ARB_uniform_buffer_object are the de-facto standard now to pass uniforms. Therefore migrate your uniform usage to UBOs, and ideally group uniforms by frequency of change into dedicated uniform blocks to maximize re-use. By using larger buffer and glBindBufferRange with offsets you can improve performance to switch between them. This method is also encouraged for Vulkan (more details in a previous article).

layout (binding= 0 ,std140) uniform viewInfo { mat4 viewProjectionMatrix; vec2 viewportSize; }; layout (binding= 1 ,std140) uniform shaderAInfo { vec4 someControlValue; float andAnother; ... }; layout (binding= 1 ,std140) uniform shaderBInfo { float blah; int blubb; ... };

NV/ARB_bindless_texture speeds up the binding of textures by using native handles instead of texture-objects. UBOs and bindless textures work fairly similar to Vulkan’s DescriptorSets.

layout (bindless_sampler,location= 1 ) uniform samplerCube envReflectionProbe; layout (binding= 1 ,std140) uniform shaderAInfo { sampler2D texAlbedo; sampler2D texNormal; float bumpIntensity; };

Uniform Arrays could be useful for small data changes, and allow us to mimic Vulkan’s “PushConstants”

layout (location= 0 ) uniform vec4 pushConstants[ 2 ]; #define myScale pushConstants[0] #define myIdx floatBitsToInt(pushConstants[1].x) void main(){ ... ... texelFetch (someDataBuffer, myIdx); ... }

State Management

Vulkan will not offer most of the generic state querying capabilities (other than the hardware capabilities), even for OpenGL relying on glGets or glIsEnabled is not good for performance. It is best if the application manages its own state in a compact way that is CPU cache-friendly. Unextended OpenGL doesn’t have that much in terms of pre-validated state either, however there is still some ways to minimize validation costs.

ARB_vertex_attrib_binding allows to define vertex format specification independent of vertex buffer bindings. Due to the expected higher frequency as well as “offset” usage, we encourage changing bindings via glBindVertexBuffers or their bindless equivalent glBufferAddressRangeNV rather than using vertex array objects. Changing the vertex-format specification is typically rarely done, as result the classic glVertexAttribPointer approach of coupling both data and format doesn’t really represent the real-world usage well.

NV_command_list is fairly close to Vulkan in this regard as well. It provides a “StateObject” analog to Vulkan’s pipeline object. The emulation layer of the command list samples provides some details what state is captured in a state object. This allows pre-validation of the state just like in Vulkan and then have much faster state transitions at render time.

glUseProgram(blah) glEnable(GL_BLEND) glStateCapture(GL_TRIANGLES, stateBlah); glUseProgram(blubb) glDisable(GL_BLEND) glStateCapture(GL_TRIANGLES, stateBlubb); glDrawCommandsStatesAddressNV(... {fbo0,fbo0,fbo1},{stateBlah,stateBlubb,stateBlah}, ... 3 )

ARB_separate_shader_objects can be useful if there is a lot of shader permutations. Keep in mind this extension is only useful if you intend to mix different stages a lot. For example you have a set of N vertex shaders that are all used with varying M fragment shaders, giving a total of NxM active pairings. In a lot of applications the fragment shaders alone are causing the lion’s share of the active pairings. When this is the case separate shader objects will not be beneficial, it may even be lower performing as cross-stage optimizations cannot be done by the compiler.

ARB_shader_subroutine has the capability to greatly speed up shader switches between a certain “family” of shaders. Vulkan’s SPIR-V introduces the concept of “specialization constants”, we can create sub-versions of the same shader by setting some hard-coded values at run-time. This can be achieved (although not as cleanly) with shader subroutines as well.

void genericMain( int state){ ... } subroutine void fn_entry(); subroutine (fn_entry) void specializedMain_0(){ genericMain( 0 ); } subroutine (fn_entry) void specializedMain_1(){ genericMain( 1 ); } subroutine uniform fn_entry used_entry; void main(){ used_entry(); } uniform int used_idx; subroutine uniform fn_entry entries[ 2 ]; void main(){ entries[used_idx](); }

Pre-validating a program under render conditions will cause the driver to generate the state-dependent version of the program. This can help to avoid later stuttering. One can achieve this by recreating the rendering state with important metrics (framebuffer configuration, multisampling state, vertex enable state…) and issuing a dummy draw-call that doesn’t actually trigger work, but triggers validation. By using the KHR_debug_output extension the NVIDIA driver will also trigger performance warnings when a program had to be recompiled because a different state was active when the program is used. While the process is not as clean as Vulkan’s pre-validation of pipeline objects, it can be an improvement over the general situation.

Conclusion

We hope these thoughts and tips are useful to speed-up your existing OpenGL applications and help migrating a rendering architecture to a more Vulkan friendly state. With time more Vulkan libraries will exist that will help the migration process further. However, depending on the application's CPU/GPU usage situation, the target platform (mobile vs desktop), and economic considerations (maintenance complexity) a migration is not a must have to make use of hardware acceleration. For some Vulkan will, however, be the ideal tool due to its all modern and multi-threaded design.