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# Vulkan GLSL RetroArch shader system
This document is a draft of RetroArch's new GPU shader system.
It will outline the features in the new shader subsystem and describe details for how it will work in practice.
In addition this document will contain various musings on why certain design choices are made and which compromised have been made to arrive at the conclusion. This is mostly for discussing and deliberation while the new system is under development.
## Introduction
### Target shader languages
- Vulkan
- GL 2.x (legacy desktop)
- GL 3.x+ (modern desktop)
- GLES2 (legacy mobile)
- GLES3 (modern mobile)
- (HLSL, potentially)
- (Metal, potentially)
RetroArch is still expected to run on GLES2 and GL2 systems.
GL2 is mostly not relevant any longer, but GLES2 is certainly a very relevant platform still and having GLES2 compatibility makes GL2 very easy.
We therefore want to avoid speccing out a design which deliberately ruins GLES2 compatibility.
However, we also do not want to artificially limit shader features which are only available in GLES2. There are many shader builtins for example which only work in GLES3/GL3 and we should not hold back support in these cases. When we want to consider GLES2 compat we should not spec out high level features which do not make much sense in the context of GLES2.
### Why a new spec?
The current shader subsystem in RetroArch is quite mature with a large body of shaders written for it. While it has served us well, it is not forward-compatible.
The current state of writing high-level shading languages that work "everywhere" is very challenging.
There was no good ready-made solution for this.
Up until now, we have relied on nVidia Cg to serve as a basic foundation for shaders, but Cg has been discontinued for years and is closed source.
This is very problematic since Cg is not a forward compatible platform.
It has many warts which are heavily tied in to legacy APIs and systems.
For this reason, we cannot use Cg for newer APIs such as Vulkan and potentially D3D12 and Metal.
Cg cross compilation to GLSL is barely working and it is horribly unmaintainable, there are several unfixable issues.
The output is so horribly mangled and unoptimized that it is clearly not the approach we should be taking.
We also cannot do the Cg transform in runtime on mobile due to lack of open source Cg runtime, so there's that as well.
Another alternative is to write straight-up GLSL, but this too has some severe problems.
All the different GL versions and GLSL variants are different enough that it becomes painful to write portable GLSL code that works without modification.
Examples include:
- varying/attribute vs in/out (legacy vs modern)
- precision qualifiers (GLSL vs ESSL)
- texture2D vs texture (legacy vs modern)
We do not want to litter every shader with heaps of #ifdefs everywhere.
We also want to avoid having to write pseudo-GLSL with some text based replacement behind the scenes.
### Warts in old shader system
While the old shader system is functional it has some severe warts which have accumulated over time.
In hindsight, some of the early design decisions were misguided and need to be properly fixed.
#### Forced POT with padding
This is arguably the largest wart of them all. The original reason behind this design decision was caused by a misguided effort to combat FP precision issues with texture sampling. The idea at the time was to avoid cases where nearest neighbor sampling at texel edges would cause artifacts. This is a typical case when textures are scaled with non-integer factors. However, the problem to begin with is naive nearest neighbor and non-integer scaling factors, and not FP precision. It was pure luck that POT tended to give better results with broken shaders, but we should not make this mistake again. POT padding has some severe issues which are not just cleanliness related either.
Technically, GLES2 doesn't require non-POT support, but in practice, all GPUs support this.
##### No proper UV wrapping
Since the texture "ends" at UV coords < 1.0, we cannot properly
use sampler wrapping modes. We can only fake `CLAMP_TO_BORDER` by padding with black color, but this filtering mode is not available by default in GLES2 and even GLES3!
`CLAMP_TO_BORDER` isn't necessarily what we want either. `CLAMP_TO_EDGE` is usually a far more sane default.
##### Extra arguments for actual width vs. texture width
With normalized coordinates we need to think in both real resolution (e.g. 320x240) vs. POT padded resolutions (512x512) to deal with normalized UV coords. This complicates things massively and
we were passing an insane amount of attributes and varyings to deal with this because the ratios between the two needn't be the same for two different textures.
#### Arbitrary limits
The way the old shader system deals with limits is quite naive.
There is a hard limit of 8 when referencing other passes and older frames.
There is no reason why we should have arbitrary limits like these.
Part of the reason is C where dealing with dynamic memory is more painful than is should be so it was easier to take the lazy way out.
#### Tacked on format handling
In more complex shaders we need to consider more than just the plain `RGBA8_UNORM` format.
The old shader system tacked on these things after the fact by adding booleans for SRGB and FP support, but this obviously doesn't scale.
This point does get problematic since GLES2 has terrible support for render target formats, but we should allow complex shaders to use complex RT formats
and rather just allow some shader presets to drop GLES2 compat.
#### PASS vs PASSPREV
Ugly. We do not need two ways to access previous passes, the actual solution is to have aliases for passes instead and access by name.
## High level Overview
The RetroArch shader format outlines a filter chain/graph, a series of shader passes which operate on previously generated data to produce a final result.
The goal is for every individual pass to access information from *all* previous shader passes, even across frames, easily.
- The filter chain specifies a number of shader passes to be executed one after the other.
- Each pass renders a full-screen quad to a texture of a certain resolution and format.
- The resolution can be dependent on external information.
- All filter chains begin at an input texture, which is created by a libretro core or similar.
- All filter chains terminate by rendering to the "backbuffer".
The backbuffer is somewhat special since the resolution of it cannot be controlled by the shader.
It can also not be fed back into the filter chain later
because the frontend (here RetroArch) will render UI elements and such on top of the final pass output.
Let's first look at what we mean by filter chains and how far we can expand this idea.
### Simplest filter chain
The simplest filter chain we can specify is a single pass.
```
(Input) -> [ Shader Pass #0 ] -> (Backbuffer)
```
In this case there are no offscreen render targets necessary since our input is rendered directly to screen.
### Multiple passes
A trivial extension is to keep our straight line view of the world where each pass looks at the previous output.
```
(Input) -> [ Shader Pass #0 ] -> (Framebuffer) -> [ Shader Pass #1 ] -> (Backbuffer)
```
Framebuffer here might have a different resolution than both Input and Backbuffer.
A very common scenario for this is separable filters where we first scale horizontally, then vertically.
### Multiple passes and multiple inputs
There is no reason why we should restrict ourselves to a straight-line view.
```
/------------------------------------------------\
/ v
(Input) -> [ Shader Pass #0 ] -> (Framebuffer #0) -> [ Shader Pass #1 ] -> (Backbuffer)
```
In this scenario, we have two inputs to shader pass #1, both the original, untouched input as well as a pass in-between.
We are now at a point where we can express an arbitrarily complex filter graph, but we can do better.
For certain effects, time can be an important factor.
### Multiple passes, multiple inputs, with history
We now extend our filter graph, where we also have access to information from earlier frames.
```
Frame N: (Input N, Input N - 1, Input N - 2) -> [ Shader Pass #0 ] -> (Framebuffer N, Framebuffer N - 1, Input N - 3) -> [ Shader Pass #1 ] -> (Backbuffer)
Frame N - 1: (Input N - 1, Input N - 2, Input N - 3) -> [ Shader Pass #0 ] -> (Framebuffer N - 1, Framebuffer N - 2, Input N - 4) -> [ Shader Pass #1 ] -> (Backbuffer)
Frame N - 2: (Input N - 2, Input N - 3, Input N - 4) -> [ Shader Pass #0 ] -> (Framebuffer N - 2, Framebuffer N - 3, Input N - 5) -> [ Shader Pass #1 ] -> (Backbuffer)
```
For framebuffers we can read the previous frames framebuffer. We don't really need more than one frame of history since we have a feedback effect in place.
Just like IIR filters, the "response" of such a feedback in the filter graph gives us essentially "infinite" history back in time, albeit it is mostly useful for long-lasting blurs and ghosting effects. Supporting more than one frame of feedback would also be extremely memory intensive since framebuffers tend to be
much higher resolution than their input counterparts.
Input textures can have arbitrary number of textures as history (just limited by memory).
They cannot feedback since the filter chain cannot render into it, so it effectively is finite response (FIR).
For the very first frames, frames with frame N < 0 are transparent black (all values 0).
# Vulkan GLSL RetroArch shader system
This document is a draft of RetroArch's new GPU shader system.
It will outline the features in the new shader subsystem and describe details for how it will work in practice.
In addition this document will contain various musings on why certain design choices are made and which compromised have been made to arrive at the conclusion. This is mostly for discussing and deliberation while the new system is under development.
## Introduction
### Target shader languages
- Vulkan
- GL 2.x (legacy desktop)
- GL 3.x+ (modern desktop)
- GLES2 (legacy mobile)
- GLES3 (modern mobile)
- (HLSL, potentially)
- (Metal, potentially)
RetroArch is still expected to run on GLES2 and GL2 systems.
GL2 is mostly not relevant any longer, but GLES2 is certainly a very relevant platform still and having GLES2 compatibility makes GL2 very easy.
We therefore want to avoid speccing out a design which deliberately ruins GLES2 compatibility.
However, we also do not want to artificially limit ourselves to shader features which are only available in GLES2.
There are many shader builtins for example which only work in GLES3/GL3 and we should not hold back support in these cases.
When we want to consider GLES2 compat we should not spec out high level features which do not make much sense in the context of GLES2.
### Why a new spec?
The current shader subsystem in RetroArch is quite mature with a large body of shaders written for it.
While it has served us well, it is not forward-compatible.
The current state of writing high-level shading languages that work "everywhere" is very challenging.
There was no good ready-made solution for this.
Up until now, we have relied on nVidia Cg to serve as a basic foundation for shaders, but Cg has been discontinued for years and is closed source.
This is very problematic since Cg is not a forward compatible platform.
It has many warts which are heavily tied in to legacy APIs and systems.
For this reason, we cannot use Cg for newer APIs such as Vulkan and potentially D3D12 and Metal.
Cg cross compilation to GLSL is barely working and it is horribly unmaintainable with several unfixable issues.
The output is so horribly mangled and unoptimized that it is clearly not the approach we should be taking.
We also cannot do the Cg transform in runtime on mobile due to lack of open source Cg runtime, so there's that as well.
Another alternative is to write straight-up GLSL, but this too has some severe problems.
All the different GL versions and GLSL variants are different enough that it becomes painful to write portable GLSL code that works without modification.
Examples include:
- varying/attribute vs in/out (legacy vs modern)
- precision qualifiers (GLSL vs ESSL)
- texture2D vs texture (legacy vs modern)
- Lack of standard support for #include to reduce copy-pasta
The problem really is that GLSL shaders are dependent on the runtime GL version, which makes it very annoying and hard to test all shader variants.
We do not want to litter every shader with heaps of #ifdefs everywhere to combat this problem.
We also want to avoid having to write pseudo-GLSL with some text based replacement behind the scenes.
#### Vulkan GLSL as the portable solution
Fortunately, there is now a forward looking and promising solution to our problems.
Vulkan GLSL is a GLSL dialect designed for Vulkan and SPIR-V intermediate representation.
The good part is that we can use whatever GLSL version we want when writing shaders, as it is decoupled from the GL runtime.
In runtime, we can have a vendor-neutral mature compiler,
[https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glslang](glslang) which compiles our Vulkan GLSL to SPIR-V.
Using [https://github.com/ARM-software/spir2cross](spir2cross), we can then do reflection on the SPIR-V binary to deduce our filter chain layout.
We can also disassemble back to our desired GLSL dialect in the GL backend based on which GL version we're running,
which effectively means we can completely sidestep all our current problems with a pure GLSL based shading system.
Another upside of this is that we no longer have to deal with vendor-specific quirks in the GLSL frontend.
A common problem when people write for nVidia is that people mistakingly use float2/float3/float4 types from Cg/HLSL, which is supported
as an extension in their GLSL frontend.
##### Why not SPIR-V directly?
This was considered, but there are several convenience problems with having a shading spec around pure SPIR-V.
The first problem is metadata. In GLSL, we can quite easily extend with custom #pragmas or similar, but there is no trivial way to do this in SPIR-V
outside writing custom tools to emit special metadata as debug information or similar.
We could also have this metadata outside in a separate file, but juggling more files means more churn, which we should try to avoid.
The other problem is convenience. If RetroArch only accepts SPIR-V, we would need an explicit build step outside RetroArch first before we could
test a shader. This gets very annoying during shader development,
so it is clear that we need to support GLSL anyways, making SPIR-V support kinda redundant.
The main argument for supporting SPIR-V would be to allow new shading languages to be used. This is a reasonable thing to consider, which is why
the goal is to not design ourselves into a corner where it's only Vulkan GLSL that can possibly work down the line. We are open to the idea that
new shading languages that target SPIR-V will emerge.
### Warts in old shader system
While the old shader system is functional it has some severe warts which have accumulated over time.
In hindsight, some of the early design decisions were misguided and need to be properly fixed.
#### Forced POT with padding
This is arguably the largest wart of them all. The original reason behind this design decision was caused by a misguided effort to combat FP precision issues with texture sampling. The idea at the time was to avoid cases where nearest neighbor sampling at texel edges would cause artifacts. This is a typical case when textures are scaled with non-integer factors. However, the problem to begin with is naive nearest neighbor and non-integer scaling factors, and not FP precision. It was pure luck that POT tended to give better results with broken shaders, but we should not make this mistake again. POT padding has some severe issues which are not just cleanliness related either.
Technically, GLES2 doesn't require non-POT support, but in practice, all GPUs support this.
##### No proper UV wrapping
Since the texture "ends" at UV coords < 1.0, we cannot properly
use sampler wrapping modes. We can only fake `CLAMP_TO_BORDER` by padding with black color, but this filtering mode is not available by default in GLES2 and even GLES3!
`CLAMP_TO_BORDER` isn't necessarily what we want either. `CLAMP_TO_EDGE` is usually a far more sane default.
##### Extra arguments for actual width vs. texture width
With normalized coordinates we need to think in both real resolution (e.g. 320x240) vs. POT padded resolutions (512x512) to deal with normalized UV coords. This complicates things massively and
we were passing an insane amount of attributes and varyings to deal with this because the ratios between the two needn't be the same for two different textures.
#### Arbitrary limits
The way the old shader system deals with limits is quite naive.
There is a hard limit of 8 when referencing other passes and older frames.
There is no reason why we should have arbitrary limits like these.
Part of the reason is C where dealing with dynamic memory is more painful than is should be so it was easier to take the lazy way out.
#### Tacked on format handling
In more complex shaders we need to consider more than just the plain `RGBA8_UNORM` format.
The old shader system tacked on these things after the fact by adding booleans for SRGB and FP support, but this obviously doesn't scale.
This point does get problematic since GLES2 has terrible support for render target formats, but we should allow complex shaders to use complex RT formats
and rather just allow some shader presets to drop GLES2 compat.
#### PASS vs PASSPREV
Ugly. We do not need two ways to access previous passes, the actual solution is to have aliases for passes instead and access by name.
#### Inconsistencies in parameter passing
MVP matrices are passed in with weird conventions in the Cg spec, and its casing is weird.
The source texture is passed with magic TEXUNIT0 semantic while other textures are passed via uniform struct members, etc.
This is the result of tacking on feature support slowly over time without proper forethought.
## High level Overview
The RetroArch shader format outlines a filter chain/graph, a series of shader passes which operate on previously generated data to produce a final result.
The goal is for every individual pass to access information from *all* previous shader passes, even across frames, easily.
- The filter chain specifies a number of shader passes to be executed one after the other.
- Each pass renders a full-screen quad to a texture of a certain resolution and format.
- The resolution can be dependent on external information.
- All filter chains begin at an input texture, which is created by a libretro core or similar.
- All filter chains terminate by rendering to the "backbuffer".
The backbuffer is somewhat special since the resolution of it cannot be controlled by the shader.
It can also not be fed back into the filter chain later
because the frontend (here RetroArch) will render UI elements and such on top of the final pass output.
Let's first look at what we mean by filter chains and how far we can expand this idea.
### Simplest filter chain
The simplest filter chain we can specify is a single pass.
```
(Input) -> [ Shader Pass #0 ] -> (Backbuffer)
```
In this case there are no offscreen render targets necessary since our input is rendered directly to screen.
### Multiple passes
A trivial extension is to keep our straight line view of the world where each pass looks at the previous output.
```
(Input) -> [ Shader Pass #0 ] -> (Framebuffer) -> [ Shader Pass #1 ] -> (Backbuffer)
```
Framebuffer here might have a different resolution than both Input and Backbuffer.
A very common scenario for this is separable filters where we first scale horizontally, then vertically.
### Multiple passes and multiple inputs
There is no reason why we should restrict ourselves to a straight-line view.
```
/------------------------------------------------\
/ v
(Input) -> [ Shader Pass #0 ] -> (Framebuffer #0) -> [ Shader Pass #1 ] -> (Backbuffer)
```
In this scenario, we have two inputs to shader pass #1, both the original, untouched input as well as the result of a pass in-between.
All the inputs to a pass can have different resolutions.
We have a way to query the resolution of individual textures to allow highly controlled sampling.
We are now at a point where we can express an arbitrarily complex filter graph, but we can do better.
For certain effects, time (or rather, results from earlier frames) can be an important factor.
### Multiple passes, multiple inputs, with history
We now extend our filter graph, where we also have access to information from earlier frames. Note that this is still a causal filter system.
```
Frame N: (Input N, Input N - 1, Input N - 2) -> [ Shader Pass #0 ] -> (Framebuffer N, Framebuffer N - 1, Input N - 3) -> [ Shader Pass #1 ] -> (Backbuffer)
Frame N - 1: (Input N - 1, Input N - 2, Input N - 3) -> [ Shader Pass #0 ] -> (Framebuffer N - 1, Framebuffer N - 2, Input N - 4) -> [ Shader Pass #1 ] -> (Backbuffer)
Frame N - 2: (Input N - 2, Input N - 3, Input N - 4) -> [ Shader Pass #0 ] -> (Framebuffer N - 2, Framebuffer N - 3, Input N - 5) -> [ Shader Pass #1 ] -> (Backbuffer)
```
For framebuffers we can read the previous frame's framebuffer. We don't really need more than one frame of history since we have a feedback effect in place.
Just like IIR filters, the "response" of such a feedback in the filter graph gives us essentially "infinite" history back in time,
although it is mostly useful for long-lasting blurs and ghosting effects. Supporting more than one frame of feedback would also be extremely memory intensive since framebuffers tend to be
much higher resolution than their input counterparts. One frame is also a nice "clean" limit. Once we go beyond just 1, the floodgate opens to arbitrary numbers, which we would want to avoid.
It is also possible to fake as many feedback frames of history we want anyways,
since we can copy a feedback frame to a separate pass anyways which effectively creates a "shift register" of feedback framebuffers in memory.
Input textures can have arbitrary number of textures as history (just limited by memory).
They cannot feedback since the filter chain cannot render into it, so it effectively is finite response (FIR).
For the very first frames, frames with frame N < 0 are transparent black (all values 0).
### No POT padding
No texture in the filter chain is padded at any time. It is possible for resolutions in the filter chain to vary over time which is common with certain emulated systems.
In this scenarios, the textures and framebuffers are simply resized appropriately.
Older frames still keep their old resolution in the brief moment that the resolution is changing.
It is very important that shaders do not blindly sample with nearest filter with any scale factor. If naive nearest neighbor sampling is to be used, shaders must make sure that
the filter chain is configured with integer scaling factors so that ambiguous texel-edge sampling is avoided.
### Deduce shader inputs by reflection
We want to have as much useful information in the shader source as possible. We want to avoid having to explicitly write out metadata in shaders whereever we can.
The biggest hurdle to overcome is how we describe our pipeline layout. The pipeline layout contains information about how we access resources such as uniforms and textures.
There are three main types of inputs in this shader system.
- Texture samplers (sampler2D)
- Uniform data describing dimensions of textures
- Uniform ancillary data for render target dimensions, backbuffer target dimensions, frame count, etc
- Uniform User-defined parameters
- Uniform MVP for vertex shader
#### Deduction by name
There are two main approaches to deduce what a sampler2D uniform wants to sample from.
The first way is to explicitly state somewhere else what that particular sampler needs, e.g.
```
uniform sampler2D geeWhatAmI;
// Metadata somewhere else
SAMPLER geeWhatAmI = Input[-2]; // Input frame from 2 frames ago
```
The other approach is to have built-in identifiers which correspond to certain textures.
```
// Source here being defined as the texture from previous framebuffer pass or the input texture if this is the first pass in the chain.
uniform sampler2D Source;
```
In SPIR-V, we can use `OpName` to describe these names, so we do not require the original Vulkan GLSL source to perform this reflection.
We use this approach throughout the specification. An identifier is mapped to an internal meaning (semantic). The shader backend looks at these semantics and constructs
a filter chain based on all shaders in the chain.
Identifiers can also have user defined meaning, either as an alias to existing identifiers or mapping to user defined parameters.
### Combining vertex and fragment into a single shader file
One strength of Cg is its ability to contain multiple shader stages in the same .cg file.
This is very convenient since we always want to consider vertex and fragment together.
This is especially needed when trying to mix and match shaders in a GUI window for example.
We don't want to require users to load first a vertex shader, then fragment manually.
GLSL however does not support this out of the box. This means we need to define a light-weight system for preprocessing
one GLSL source file into multiple stages.
#### Should we make vertex optional?
In most cases, the vertex shader will remain the same.
This leaves us with the option to provide a "default" vertex stage if the shader stage is not defined.
### #include support
With complex filter chains there is a lot of oppurtunity to reuse code.
We therefore want light support for the #include directive.
### User parameter support
Since we already have a "preprocessor" of sorts, we can also trivially extend this idea with user parameters.
In the shader source we can specify which uniform inputs are user controlled, GUI visible name, their effective range, etc.
### Lookup textures
A handy feature to have is reading from lookup textures.
We can specify that some sampler inputs are loaded from a PNG file on disk as a plain RGBA8 texture.
#### Do we want to support complex reinterpretation?
There could be valid use cases for supporting other formats than plain `RGBA8_UNORM`.
`SRGB` and `UINT` might be valid cases as well and maybe even 2x16-bit, 1x32-bit integer formats.
#### Lookup buffers
Do we want to support lookup buffers as UBOs as well?
This wouldn't be doable in GLES2, but it could be useful as a more modern feature.
If the LUT is small enough, we could realize it via plain old uniforms as well perhaps.
This particular feature could be very interesting for generic polyphase lookup banks with different LUT files for different filters.