Hi, I have some conceptual and architectural questions that are not directly related to Servo. I hope it is not out of context to this group.
I am currently trying to understand and compare browser engine performance. I read many articles and tutorials about the architecture of browser engines and the way they handle layout->renderinng->painting. One thing caught my attention. All modern engines started delegating compositing work to the GPU and are migrating more render components to the GPU(1). On the Design document about Servo, it is stated that parallelism to GPU for layered rendering is partially implemented. This is where my question comes in. Even if a team do their best to get render wrok done in GPU, they are actullay sharing the same limits as other kinds of rendering engines (like video games ) that are not specifically optimized for certain GPUs. The bottleneck has always been talking to the GPU with a single thread and the way context is handled. Which means GPU cycle time is wasted when the CPU is working on other tasks. I have been closely following what is happening in the GPU drivers and APIs since AMD announced Mantle and MS DirectX 12, now we have glNext(Vulkan) coming to cross-device platforms. This new family of GPU APIs will allow more control over the GPU and give total access to the chip Shaders and Memory. glNext will even get rid of GLSL in exchange of a new language that compiles to a standardized IR. But most importantly they will allow multi threaded access to the GPU, which is what makes them a game changer in many fields in the upcoming years. So, is it possible that using glNext multi threaded access to the GPU and all the low level access to the chips will give signifiant performance boosts (if implemented the right way) to browser engines rendring and especially Servo since the main goal is performance and parallelism. Did the Servo team talk about this topic ? What are the implications of this new GPU APIs on browser engine rendering ? Chakib 1: http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/gpu-accelerated-compositing-in-chrome/gpu-architecture-roadmap _______________________________________________ dev-servo mailing list dev-servo@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-servo
