Shaders
- ui-text and ui-fused turned a sample of the R8_UNORM atlas into a
distance with (128/255 - sdf) * 32. stb_truetype writes kOnEdgeValue +
kPixelDistScale * distance into each byte, so an atlas pixel is
kPixelDistScale / 255 of a sample; 32 made every distance 1024/255
(about 4) times too large, and the coverage ramp, meant to span one
screen pixel, spanned a quarter of one: nearly every edge pixel came out
fully on or fully off, and text looked pixelated at every size. On an
RTX 4090, UIFallbackParity's 22 px label had 98 partly covered pixels
where stb_truetype's own rasterizer has 415. Wrong since the v3 UI
(1f56973), and copied into the fused kernel (574242d).
- The decode now lives once, in ui-shared.glsl: UI_SDF_ON_EDGE and
UI_SDF_PIXEL_DIST_SCALE are FontAtlas's two constants in the encoder's
own units, uiSdfDistance decodes a sample, uiGlyphRamp works out a
glyph's ramp when it is loaded and uiGlyphCoverage the coverage per
pixel. Both kernels call them, and a copy of either should; the UI_
prefix keeps them clear of a copied kernel's own names.
- stb_truetype truncates, so a byte b stands for [b, b + 1) of the encoded
value and the decode takes its middle: decoding b pulled every outline
1/64 atlas pixel inwards.
- The ramp is capped at what a byte holds, about 4 atlas pixels each way
of the outline. With the corrected decode a wider one left every glyph
quad's padding translucent below 4 px.
- The UV span is taken with abs(): a glyph turned by swapping its UVs got
a negative scale, a ramp of 0.0001 and hard edges.
- A glyph scaled differently along x and y ramps along the distance's
gradient, from two one-texel differences. With the corrected decode, one
width for both axes, the more minified one's, would leave a row stretched
three times with stems three pixels soft. Glyphs scaled alike, as
ShapeText's are, keep one multiply-add per pixel, the ramp's reciprocal
worked out with the glyph.
- The atlas size is queried rather than FontAtlas::kAtlasSize hard-coded
as 1024.
WebGPU
- The WGSL text kernel decoded the distance right but ramped over one
atlas pixel whatever the size: half a screen pixel at 16 px, two at
64 px. It now repeats ui-shared.glsl's decode, cap, abs and gradient
path, and renders TextAntialiasing's scene as Vulkan does (run through
Deno's WebGPU: 1.02, 1.07 and 1.09 times the reference's edge pixels,
where the old kernel gave 0.55, 2.19 and 0.89).
FontAtlas
- kOnEdgeValue and kPixelDistScale say the kernels carry copies of them.
Tests
- TextAntialiasing draws one string at 14 px, 64 px and 14 px stretched
three times, a 'g' turned by its UVs and empty atlas texels shrunk to
12.8 atlas pixels per screen pixel, through DispatchText and again
through DispatchFused, and holds them to stb_truetype's antialiased
rasterizer, to the mirror image and to nothing. On master the two plain
rows have 0.31 and 0.21 times the reference's edge pixels; with the
decode fixed alone the stretched row had 1.62 times, the turned 'g' was
127 codes off its mirror and the empty texels drew 48. Now: 1.02, 1.07
and 1.09 times, 0 and 0, on the 4090, on llvmpipe and on descriptor
sets. It skips a swapchain that isn't 8-bit, which the capture can't
read, and captures the first frame.
- FontAtlasDecode reads ui-shared.glsl and dom-webgpu.js and holds their
copies of the two constants to FontAtlas's. No GPU.
Docs
- AGENTS.consumer.md has a custom text shader decode through the helpers
and gives the encoding; README says so in a line; AGENTS.md lists the
tests and where the decode lives.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
uiCompactChunk ran the survivor scan entirely on gl_LocalInvocationIndex
== 0: ~64 serial iterations with 63/64 lanes idle, between two barriers,
4x per chunk in the fused kernel. It must emit a stable in-order
(buffer-order) exclusive prefix of the survivors so the per-pixel inner
loop still sees items in draw order.
Replace it with a per-subgroup subgroupExclusiveAdd of the keep bits plus
a carry across subgroups: each subgroup publishes its survivor total to
shared memory, then every lane sums the totals of all lower-id subgroups
for its base. A survivor's slot in s_order[] therefore equals the number
of survivors with a smaller local index — buffer (draw) order preserved
exactly, unlike an atomicAdd which would scramble it.
The carry makes the result correct for any subgroup width (2 subgroups on
the 32-wide descriptor_heap target, up to 8/16 on narrower parts), relying
only on the gl_LocalInvocationIndex <-> (gl_SubgroupID,
gl_SubgroupInvocationID) linear mapping every Vulkan compute
implementation provides. The feature is free at the device baseline
(apiVersion 1.4 + VK_EXT_descriptor_heap implies Vulkan 1.1 subgroup
arithmetic), so no correctness fallback is needed; WebGPU is unaffected
(separate embedded WGSL).
Applied to ui-fused.comp.glsl and the same pattern inlined in
ui-quads/circles/images/text.
Verified: all 23 tests pass (UIFusedShader recompiles + spirv-val +
pins push-constant offsets); a 140k-trial CPU simulation of the algorithm
matches the serial reference for subgroup sizes 1..64; HelloUI renders
correctly on an RTX 4090 (DispatchFused quads+circles+text) with draw
order intact.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The cooperative-load section already streams each item into shared memory
once per workgroup, but the per-pixel inner loop then recomputed values
that are constant for the whole item/glyph. The compiler can't hoist them
itself — they read shared memory at a varying index.
Precompute them once per item at load time into new shared slots:
- ui-images / ui-text / ui-fused (images+text phases): invRectSize =
1.0/rect.zw, turning the per-pixel `(sp-rect.xy)/rect.zw` vec2 divide
into a multiply.
- ui-text / ui-fused (text phase): the SDF AA `band` (a vec2 divide +
two maxes depending only on the glyph's uv span and rect size).
In ui-fused the new slots (s_inv, s_band) are reused across phases like
the existing s_v* scratch, so the LDS bump is per-category, not summed.
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>