On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 7:59 AM, Andreas Gal <[email protected]> wrote:
> Rationale: > switching shaders tends to be expensive. > In my opinion this is the only argument for working on this at moment. Particularly at the moment where we're overwhelmed with high priority desktop and mobile graphics work, I'd like to see numbers before we consider a change. I have seen no indications that we get hurt by switching shaders. I suspected it might matter when we start to have 100s of layers in a single page but we always fall down from another reason before this can become a problem. I'd like to be able to answer 'In which use cases would patching this lead to a user measurable improvement?' before working on this. Right now we have a long list of bugs where we have a clear answer to that question. Patching this is good to check off that we're using the GPU optimally on the GPU best practice dev guides and will later help us batch draw calls more aggressively but I'd like to have data to support this first. Also old Android drivers are a bit touchy with shaders so I recommend counting some dev times for resolving these issues. I know that roc and nrc have some plans for introducing more shaders which will make a unified shader approach more difficult. I'll let them weight in here. On the flip side I suspect having a single unified shader will be faster to compile then the several shaders we have on the start-up path. _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
