RFC: WebGPURenderer prototype single uniform buffer update / pass

[aardgoose]

Prototype mechanism to reduce number of writeBuffer() calls using a single large buffer for all object uniforms groups, which is updated before the renderPass is submitted. As used in some other engines with WebGPU.

All examples run correctly with this PR. Effects greatest with large numbers of objects being rendered. The largest changes are the GPU thread times which are greatly reduced when testing with the webgpu_sprites examples. From 5ms/frame with per object buffer to 2.5ms with single buffer in my brief testing.

No attempt has been made:

• to synchronize the buffer updating and reading
• allow buffer resizing or detect buffer overflow
• recovery of buffer space on object deletion.

[sunag]

Reduce the number of calls from writeBuffer() is too part of #27134 After configuring, many things called will be reduced, instead of being updated per object, they will be updated per frame.

I like your idea, but I wonder if it wouldn't be better to have this configured in Node and adjusted at setup()?

[sunag]

Hi @aardgoose

Do you think about fixing the conflicts? I was thinking about merge this PR soon

[aardgoose]

I'll take a look tomorrow.

[RenaudRohlinger]

Awesome! Is it ready for review @aardgoose? Can you promote it from Draft to PR maybe? 😊

[aardgoose]

@RenaudRohlinger will do.

We might want to select specific uniform groups to be managed in this way, which is now possible as the buffer is passed through the NodeBuilder.

An obvious next stage is to look at reclaiming unused buffers, but we need a deallocation mechanism first, when a material is disposed of.

[aardgoose]

Added lists per extent size (multiple of block size) for freed buffers when objects are removed from the scene graph.. These lists are used for new allocations in preference to free space at the end of the buffer.

Block size is typically 256 bytes (https://web3dsurvey.com/webgpu/limits/minStorageBufferOffsetAlignment).

Added reworked example with continuous removal and addition of new objects and stats demonstrating buffer use. This only uses blocks of 256B or less.

[github-actions]

📦 Bundle size

Full ESM build, minified and gzipped.

Filesize dev	Filesize PR	Diff
685.1 kB (169.6 kB)	685.1 kB (169.6 kB)	+0 B

🌳 Bundle size after tree-shaking

Minimal build including a renderer, camera, empty scene, and dependencies.

Filesize dev	Filesize PR	Diff
462 kB (111.4 kB)	462 kB (111.4 kB)	+0 B

[Spiri0]

@aardgoose This is better than I imagined. This is an entire ecosystem for managing uniform groups. I have to take a look at it in peace, because I see you've already put a lot of energy into it.

[Spiri0]

What I don't see yet is the possibility of bundling uniforms in custom uniformsGroups as a user. This made it possible to separate uniforms that are constantly updated from uniforms that are rarely or not updated at all.
For the visibility check in compute shaders, it makes sense to combine the camera matrices, frustum, ... into a uniformsGroup, while the many meshes whose uniforms do not change or rarely change are in another uniformsGroup.

[Spiri0]

I think this is a very good thing, but there is a lack of parameterization if users want to create UniformGroups themselves. As far as I can see, the UniformsGroup class is intended for use in the backend.

As an illustrative example, here are some uniforms that I use. At the moment I can pass these all individually to the shader.

const frustumStruct = struct({
    cameraProjectionMatrix: cameraProjectionMatrix,
    cameraProjectionMatrixInverse: cameraProjectionMatrixInverse,
    cameraViewMatrix: cameraViewMatrix,
    frustumPlanes: array(frustum, 'vec4'),  //the six frustumplanes and their constants. struct and array are my custom test nodes
    viewport: vec4( viewportSize, cameraNear, cameraFar ),
    cameraPosition: vec4(cameraPosition, 0)
});

But I think a little further ahead where the journey with WebGPU is going. I replaced the classic attributes in my vertex shader with storagebuffers because they give me access to all vertices. With a drawIndirect buffer and an infobuffer which contains the information about the visibility of the instances, I no longer have any attributes at all. The vertex shader is controlled via drawIndirect and my InstanceInfoBuffer, both of which I fill in a compute shader.
It was only afterwards that I realized what this meant for the future, being able to completely replace the attributes with drawIndirect, compute shader and storagebuffers. This is unreal engine level.
Handing over all the uniforms individually and then later having Aardgoose's extension bundle everything together will certainly work, but for clarity in applications and also to separate constantly changing uniforms from those that don't change at all, in my opinion bundling that can be parameterized by the user also makes sense.
So there are two different application areas backend bundling and frontend bundling and both are very useful. I imagine that in the future threejs would also like to provide the indirect visibility check as a buildin functionality and it makes sense to combine the neccessary elements in structs from the start. What is your opinion on this?
Over time I can certainly get more into it to work out my experimental struct and array node properly, but it will take time since I do a lot on the user side