Window
- CreateSwapchain asked for exactly numFrames (3) images whatever the
surface said, read them into a three-element array, and keyed the
command buffers, the fences and the descriptor-heap copy holding "its"
swapchain image by the acquired image index. A swapchain of another
size fell back to FIFO (asked for MAILBOX or IMMEDIATE) or threw, and a
surface whose minimum is above three got a create info below it
(#160). Mesa's MAILBOX needs four images: Turnip on phoc, llvmpipe on
any Wayland compositor.
- The present mode is picked first, then the swapchain is sized by
SwapchainCapabilities: the surface's counts for that mode where the
instance has surface_maintenance1. With swapchain_maintenance1 the
swapchain names its mode (VkSwapchainPresentModesCreateInfoKHR), which
is what makes the mode's own count the one that applies, at creation and
to the forward progress of a UINT64_MAX acquire; without it the stricter
of the mode's and the surface's counts for all modes. It asks for
numFrames or that minimum where more, never past the maximum
(SwapchainMinImageCount). Turnip's FIFO keeps its three images and
MAILBOX gets four. The FIFO fallback and presentModeUnfit are gone.
- images, imageViewInfos (was imageViews: they are create-infos), the made
imageViews that descriptor sets take, imageInitialised and the
render-finished semaphores are per image, as many as the driver made.
The views are made once per swapchain. The semaphores only grow, since
a present of the old swapchain may still wait on one.
- Frames in flight stay numFrames, keyed by currentFrame, frameCounter %
numFrames: the command buffer, the fence, the acquire semaphore, the
heap copy (or set), RenderingElement3D::tlases, the frameIdx a pass is
recorded with. currentImage is the acquired image. currentBuffer is
gone, so code that used it stops compiling instead of picking the wrong
one; RenderPass::Record's frameIdx keeps its name and is now the frame
slot, as RenderPass.cppm says.
- The frame's fence is waited before the acquire. The acquire semaphores
need no spare then, and a frame waits for exactly the one numFrames
before it, which the deletion queue and the staging rings count on and
fences keyed by image did not promise once images come back out of
order. The swapchain slots are written before the fence is reset.
- From the acquire to the present the window is recording: a Resize or
SetPresentMode from a listener (a VSync key ticked in onUpdate) takes
effect after the present, through RebuildSwapchain, together with a
present that found the swapchain out of date. Rebuilding mid-frame used
to destroy the image the frame was drawing into; with images sized per
swapchain it would also index past the new one's end.
DescriptorHeapVulkan
- Frames and images pair up differently from frame to frame, so no heap
copy can keep one swapchain image. AddSwapchainSlot(slot, window) lists
an image slot as that window's swapchain image, and Window::Render
writes the image a frame acquired into its window's listed slots in that
frame's copy, or its set, before onUpdate, skipping a slot that holds it
already. A slot is one window's, so two windows can share a heap without
writing each other's slots under each other's frames in flight. A slot
listed during a frame its window records is written at once. A slot past
the heap's image slots, an empty ImageSlot's 0xFFFF among them, is
refused. Freeing a slot unlists it, as does initialising the heap in
either binding model. WriteImageSet, the one use of which this
replaces, is gone, and with it the per-frame dimension of setImageViews.
Device
- VK_KHR_surface_maintenance1 (or EXT) and VK_KHR_get_surface_capabilities2
are enabled where the loader has them (surfaceMaintenance1Supported,
vkGetPhysicalDeviceSurfaceCapabilities2KHR), and the matching
swapchain_maintenance1 with its feature where the device has it
(swapchainMaintenance1Supported).
- DistinctGpus groups the physical devices by GPU as CRAFTER_GRAPHICS_DEVICE
numbers them, for ChooseGpu and tests.
UI
- UIRenderer lists its output slot instead of writing every copy itself,
and again on every resize; the resize listener is gone on both
backends. The headers' frameIdx is currentFrame.
Examples
- VulkanTriangle, Sponza, SponzaBench and RTVolume list their output slot
and write only the per-frame TLASes. They wrote imageViews[f] into copy
f once, which a resize left pointing at destroyed images.
Tests
- SwapchainImageCount: SwapchainMinImageCount on the numbers drivers
report; every offered mode keeps its mode and gets what the window asks
for; every frame presents the colour it drew, read back a texel per
frame; a switch and a resize asked for during a frame wait for its
present; a slot listed during a frame holds its image at once; two
windows on one heap draw their own colours. The frame checks run again
in child processes, through CRAFTER_GRAPHICS_DEVICE, on a GPU whose
swapchains have more images than frames (this one, else llvmpipe), in
each binding model the parent didn't cover; a child skips only for a GPU
that can't run the library, and checks it runs the model it was asked
for.
- FrameLoopSync checks the frame slot follows the frame counter and counts
the swapchain's own images. HeapASRead, HeapDynamicIndexHit and
RTPassPushData list their swapchain slot and drop their resize rewrites.
Docs
- README, AGENTS.md and AGENTS.consumer.md: frames and images, the
swapchain slots, rebuilds held to the present, the new optional groups.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Device::Initialize required twelve device extensions with no capability
check. Mesa Turnip (Adreno) lacks six of them: VK_EXT_descriptor_heap,
VK_KHR_shader_untyped_pointers, VK_EXT_device_fault and the three ray
tracing extensions. vkCreateDevice failed there, so not even a UI-only
program could start, although the UI path is compute-only and needs
nothing else that Turnip is missing.
The descriptor heap, ray tracing and device fault are now optional
groups, detected at start-up from the extension list and the feature
bits (Device::descriptorHeapSupported, rayTracingSupported,
deviceFaultSupported). Ray tracing needs the heap; on a device without
it the ray tracing entry points throw a message naming the cause.
Without the heap the same bindless slots live in one update-after-bind
descriptor set per frame, owned by DescriptorHeapVulkan: binding 0
storage images, 1 sampled images, 2 samplers, 3 storage buffers. Slot
allocation, the slot handles, UIDispatchHeader and the UIRenderer API
are unchanged; buffer slots simply stop being offset. Window::Render
binds that frame's set where it binds the heap, every compute pipeline
shares the heap object's pipeline layout, and push data travels as push
constants.
Each UI kernel is built twice from one source. ui-shared.glsl declares
its resources through UI_HEAP_* macros that expand to descriptor_heap
or, with CRAFTER_GRAPHICS_DESCRIPTOR_SETS defined, to set/binding.
<name>.comp.spv and <name>.comp.sets.spv ship side by side and
ComputeShader::Load picks one. The heap build of every shader is
byte-identical to before.
Breaking:
- ComputeShader::Load takes the heap as a second argument.
- DescriptorHeapVulkan is no longer copyable or movable.
- Custom UI shaders declare heap resources with the UI_HEAP_* macros
and are registered twice in project.cpp (see the README).
- project.cpp uses Shader::defines and Shader::variant, so it needs a
crafter-build that has them (Crafter.Build master, fe38cc1 or later).
Also:
- maintenance5 is enabled as a feature, not only as an extension:
every VulkanBuffer already relied on VkBufferUsageFlags2CreateInfo.
- Barrier stage masks drop RAY_TRACING_SHADER on devices without ray
tracing, and ImageVulkan::Create resolves its default consumer stage
to COMPUTE_SHADER there.
- Window refuses a swapchain whose image count is not numFrames
instead of writing past images[]. The limitation itself is #160.
- CRAFTER_GRAPHICS_NO_DESCRIPTOR_HEAP forces the fallback on a driver
that has the heap, so it can be exercised on a desktop GPU.
Verified on an RTX 4090 in both modes under the validation layer, and
on a Fairphone 6 (Turnip, Adreno 810, postmarketOS), where the fallback
is the only path.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
WriteBufferDescriptor / WriteSampledImageDescriptor / RegisterSampler /
WriteSwapchainDescriptors each FlushDevice()'d the entire multi-KB per-frame
descriptor heap after writing one few-byte descriptor. Add a ranged
VulkanBuffer::FlushDevice(offset, bytes) that flushes only the touched bytes,
rounding the range outward to nonCoherentAtomSize as vkFlushMappedMemoryRanges
requires (the WHOLE_SIZE path sidestepped that). The coherent-memory gate from
issue #60 is preserved — coherent memory still skips the flush entirely.
The descriptor writers now self-flush their written range, so the redundant
whole-heap flushes in UIRenderer::Initialize and the resize callback are gone.
Rounding lives in AlignMappedFlushRange (pure math) and is unit-tested without
a device in the new VulkanBufferRangedFlush test; the change was also verified
end-to-end by running HelloUI on a real GPU with validation layers (font-atlas
glyphs, sampler and storage-image descriptors all flush correctly, no VUIDs).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Add a fifth UI compute path — DispatchFused — alongside the four
per-element Dispatch* calls. It composites quads → circles → images →
text (canonical back-to-front order) in ONE dispatch that loads the
destination image once and stores once, eliminating the per-pass
load+store and the inter-pass VkMemoryBarriers a run of consecutive
Dispatch* calls would pay. The win materialises at >= 2 non-empty
categories; an absent category is a zero-trip, push-constant-uniform
loop (~free).
The new uber-kernel (shaders/ui-fused.comp.glsl) reuses each category's
exact cooperative shared-memory tile-cull + per-pixel accumulate, so a
fused category is pixel-identical to its standalone pass. Categories run
sequentially per thread and share one set of shared-memory scratch, so
the VGPR/shared high-water mark stays at the per-category level, not the
sum.
Additive and non-breaking: the per-element Dispatch* calls and the
frozen 48-byte UIDispatchHeader are untouched. DispatchFused gets its own
128-byte push-constant layout (UIFusedHeader: four uvec4 headers + four
per-category clip vec4s). To interleave a custom ui.Dispatch() between
standard passes, bracket it with two DispatchFused calls — the dispatch
boundary is the explicit, app-declared flush point.
WebGPU (Vulkan-second): DispatchFused falls back to the per-element
Dispatch* calls in canonical order — one texture/sampler per dispatch
there can't feed the bindless image phase — so the result matches; only
the load/store fusion is Vulkan-only.
HelloUI now composites its background quads, mouse circle, and label
text in a single DispatchFused. Verified rendering identical on a live
Vulkan/Wayland session.
Resolves#47
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
UIRenderer::Dispatch inserted a queue-wide VkMemoryBarrier
(SHADER_WRITE -> SHADER_READ|WRITE) before every dispatch after the
first, flushing/invalidating all shader caches even though the only
hazard is the read-modify-write of the single swapchain storage image
that every UI pass shares.
Narrow it to a VkImageMemoryBarrier scoped to that image's subresource
(COMPUTE -> COMPUTE, GENERAL -> GENERAL, no layout transition). Same
correctness — later passes still observe earlier passes' writes — but
only this image's caches are flushed; unrelated resources are no longer
invalidated.
This is a narrower cache flush only: the execution dependency stays
compute->compute queue-wide, so passes still do not overlap. Eliminating
the barriers entirely requires pass fusion (#47) and is intentionally
out of scope here.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
