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AllegorithmicSubstance
Threaded Middleware
2
Procedural textures on multi-core
•Other than framerate and features, what else can you do with extra CPU power ?
•We’ll look at Allegorithmic’s middleware, Substance
3
Procedural textures are valuable for modern games
•Have a LOT of textures.•Want shorter loading times ( , faster starts
)teleportations or zooms .•Need to reduce texture memory on a disc, for
download, and/or in RAM.•Can benefit from more flexible and reusable
assets.
Introducing Substance
In Q2 2007 Allegorithmic started a complete reengineering of ProFX2, authoring tool and engine, named Substance.
Unit tests were done very early to ensure that Substance could target streaming.
Cross-platform : PC, PS3, XBOX, etc. Expected linear multi-thread scalability.
What is Substance ?
Substance is a middleware product composed of two elements.
Substance Authoring Tool lets you create procedural textures create texture packages of a few kilobytes ! A cooker compiles generic data into binaries
optimized for a specific platform or user. Substance Engine
generates bitmap textures on the fly.
Less FPS ?
More textures, not less FPS Substance consumes idle cycles, not frames
Graphics bitrates follow Moore's law Higher poly count → bigger worlds Higher filter rate → larger textures Desired texture volume grows faster than RAM
Streaming is a necessity But HDD net bitrate does not follow. Bottleneck !
Modern gameplay entails sudden bitrate bursts This is worsened by HDD seeks and entails stalls.
No, a stable and high FPS.
Even masked, a stall is actually a FPS drop Substance works in Random Access Memory The gamer zooms or teleports:
Give 4 cores and a GPU to Substance Sacrifice 1 or 2 frames Substance gen. & cache 1-2M new texels. The stall does not hinder game play.
Substance diminishes stalls Substance helps to maintain a high FPS.
Performance issue:streaming in games
DVD or HDD net bitrate is 2 or 6 MB/s Our aim: add a stable 4MB/s without the GPU Requires billions of intermediate pixels/s. Can CPUs compete with GPUs ? Opportunity: cores are still under-exploited in
most game engines. Texture processing is privileged in the new
multi-core architectures.
The architecture was designed with these issues in mind:
Homogeneous CPU and GPU versions Streaming (~1-10 CPU cycles per pixel) SIMD & MT for the multi-core generations No cache nor threading pollution Fine grained jobs and lockless sync. Low memory footprint
The theoretical benefit was calculated
New architectures come with enhanced SIMD. Expected x10 compared to std C++
Tricks and algorithmic changes could give another x10 on some filters, like DXT
We were confident that our image processes could be well threaded. Partly because we generate textures asynchronously
Hence the CPU version of ProFX2 could be accelerated by a factor x25-x100
This is the approach taken to address the issue:
Simple innerloop tests actually showed that optimized SSE2-4 code could give a boost of x10
Find a data layout coherent with micro parallelism (SIMD and pipeline), low level threading, cache and memory handling.
OpenMP is then used to test strategies before designing a specific MT HAL
Here’s the code that was developed to make this possible:
A SIMD HAL is ready for PC, Xbox, PS3. OpenMP easily gives a 85% MT linearity. Our MT HAL is converging towards a model of
lockless synchronization, 95% expected. The cooker precomputes data that will help
synchronization and MT efficiency. Our API exposes asynchronous commands.
Perfect to share cores with a game loop !
The compositing graph,node based image processing
Authoring Tool: non linear editing Engine: efficient high level structure Graph (DAG) contains 3 types of nodes:
Sources: procedural noise, bitmaps, SVGs Filters: blend, HSL, TRS, warp, blur, etc. Outputs: coherent diffuse & normal maps, etc.
Main advantages: Libraries, capsules: instanciation of subgraphs Complex variants: fast to create and compute Dynamic custom branches (ex: aging textures)
The compositing graph,node based image processing
Threading strategies
High level threading: Task decomposition : 1 node (filter) per thread Graph splitting ensures task independency
Low level threading: Data decomposition : 1 strip of blocks per thread Dispatcher ensures non conflicting areas Pixel to pixel filters are concatenated. Streamed R/W, no L2 cache pollution Temporary blocks in private L1 double buffers Intermediate images never allocated Lockless reactive sync and cache friendly
Threading sub graphs (1/11)by nodes (high level)
Threading sub graphs (2/11)by nodes, caching
Threading sub graphs (3/11)by nodes
Threading sub graphs (4/11)by strips (low level)
Threading sub graphs (5/11)remove from cache
Threading sub graphs (6/11)by strips
Threading sub graphs (7/11)remove from cache
Threading sub graphs (8/11)by strips
Threading sub graphs (9/11)remove from cache
Threading sub graphs (10/11)by strips
Threading sub graphs (11/11)update cache, and finished
Expect more streaming bandwidth
Substance generates 4MB/s of compressed textures per second
Cumulate this with classical streaming 50+ MB/s loading with 4 cores and 1 GPU
streaming1/2 core
1 core2 cores
2 cores4 cores
4 coresadd GPU
0
10
20
30
40
50 GPUPenrynYorkfieldCD, DVD
Here’s how close we got to the theoretical best performance:
DXT compression at 2G pixels/s (same as what hi-end GPUs can do in 2007).
8 bits SVG (cooked) rendering at 20G/s. 8G/s anti-aliasing with 4 sub-samples.
In most cases 4 cores give a x3.8 boost Some filters are more problematic, but solutions
have been imagined in details, and will be implemented between Q2 and Q4 2008.
Here’s the new performance profile:
DXT TRS Blend SVG0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
1400
1600
1800
2000
ProFX2Substance
Substance and ProFX2 figures are for one core.
4 cores: 3.8 times more fillrate.
ProFX2: SVG GPU Substance: SVG CPU SVG AA: 2G pixels/s
per core
This is future-proofed
The cooker precomputes whatever helps to linearise computations.
Scalable code: SSE4 added in one day thanks to the SIMD HAL
Scalable threading: our two strategies scale A few functions dispatch virtual CPU "shaders" 64-cores ready ↔ code a new dispatcher ? Multiplatform design.
What’s next?
Procedural diffuse map
Coherent procedural normal map
Complex procedural environment map
This scene is made entirely of
proceduraltextures
Future sources of bandwidth
SIMD code can be better pipelined in ASM. Our cooker can optimize a lot of things. Authoring tool will have a RT profiler Artists gaining experience with Substance will
also optimize their packages better. Artist feedback will also help us to improve the
expressiveness of each filter ~30-50 filters per texture, main perf. divisor.
Here’s how you can best take advantage of procedural textures
Anticipate texture generation requests. Predict visibility (HOM, PVS). Create mipmaps. Access levels JIT. Cache the useful texels. Adapt texture resolution to workload. Use texture variants, less tiling textures or
details. Show a higher texel/pixel ratio.
What do you think?
Have you tried something like this? Have you rejected trying something like this?