Crafter.Graphics/examples/VulkanTriangle
Repository files (latest commit first)
Filename Latest commit message Latest commit date
Jorijn van der Graaf 234fcce099
fix(window): size the swapchain for its present mode, and key frames in flight by frame instead of image
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>
2026-10-31 18:14:18 +01:00
..
closesthit.glsl SPDX license update 2026-07-22 18:09:06 +02:00
closesthit.wgsl SPDX license update 2026-07-22 18:09:06 +02:00
main.cpp fix(window): size the swapchain for its present mode, and key frames in flight by frame instead of image 2026-10-31 18:14:18 +01:00
miss.glsl SPDX license update 2026-07-22 18:09:06 +02:00
miss.wgsl SPDX license update 2026-07-22 18:09:06 +02:00
project.cpp SPDX license update 2026-07-22 18:09:06 +02:00
raygen.glsl SPDX license update 2026-07-22 18:09:06 +02:00
raygen.wgsl SPDX license update 2026-07-22 18:09:06 +02:00
README.md fix(window): size the swapchain for its present mode, and key frames in flight by frame instead of image 2026-10-31 18:14:18 +01:00

VulkanTriangle

The minimal ray-traced example. Renders a single static triangle through vkCmdTraceRaysKHR. No UI.

What it shows

  • Device::Initialize({.vulkan10 = {.shaderInt16 = VK_TRUE}}) + Window + swapchain bring-up. The raygen takes the heap's buffer start as a uint16_t spec constant, which needs shaderInt16; without asking for it, loading the shader throws, naming the feature.
  • A DescriptorHeapVulkan sized for one image + one buffer slot, with slot ranges allocated via the bump-allocator API (AllocateImageSlots, AllocateBufferSlots).
  • A PipelineRTVulkan built from raygen / miss / closesthit SPIR-V shaders compiled at build time.
  • Mesh::Build constructing a BLAS and RenderingElement3D::BuildTLAS the per-frame TLAS.
  • Direct descriptor writes via vkWriteResourceDescriptorsEXT for the per-frame TLAS device addresses, and AddSwapchainSlot for the output image, which the window writes with the swapchain image each frame draws into.
  • RTPass{&pipeline} plugged into window.passes — the canonical way to add ray tracing to a window in this library.

It's the smallest sensible test of the bindless VK_EXT_descriptor_heap

  • ray-tracing path.

Run

cd examples/VulkanTriangle
crafter-build -r

You should see a 1280×720 window with an RGB-barycentric triangle filling roughly the centre. On the NVIDIA driver this works through an engine-side workaround for a driver fault — see below.

Native status — NVIDIA driver fault, worked around

On NVIDIA driver 610.43.02 (Vulkan 1.4) reading the acceleration structure through VK_EXT_descriptor_heap aborts the device with VK_ERROR_DEVICE_LOST on the first frame. This is a driver-side fault in the brand-new descriptor-heap acceleration-structure path, not an engine bug (full investigation in #7, summarised below).

The engine works around it transparently (issue #15). On the NVIDIA proprietary driver only, VulkanShader rewrites the compiled SPIR-V at module-load time so that every OpLoad of an accelerationStructureEXT out of the heap becomes a load of the TLAS device address (from a push-constant block) followed by OpConvertUToAccelerationStructureKHR — which reads no descriptor and so never touches the faulting path. RTPass feeds the active frame's TLAS address in as push data. SPIR-V allows only one push-constant block per entry point, so when a shader already declares one the TLAS address is appended to that block (rather than adding a second, which would fail validation — issue #18); shaders without a push constant get a freshly synthesized single-member block. raygen.glsl and the example code are unchanged; acceleration structures still bind into the heap normally. On every other driver the workaround is inert. It's gated on Device::workaroundDescriptorHeapAS and confined to one fenced block in interfaces/Crafter.Graphics-ShaderVulkan.cppm so it can be deleted wholesale once a fixed NVIDIA driver ships.

Status on later drivers

On 615.78.08 the fault is still there. With the rewrite off (CRAFTER_GRAPHICS_NO_AS_WORKAROUND set), traceRayEXT still loses the device, and an inline ray query that reads the TLAS from the heap no longer faults but renders nothing. Mesa's llvmpipe now advertises VK_EXT_descriptor_heap too and renders the plain heap read correctly, which is a second implementation backing the conclusion below. tests/HeapASRead renders this triangle through both paths and checks the pixels; HeapASRead --no-workaround is the quick check for a new driver, reporting each path on its own.

The underlying fault (#7)

The fault was traced to the acceleration-structure read through VK_EXT_descriptor_heap, not to the engine's RT setup:

  • The BLAS/TLAS build is correct and finishes before rendering (Window::FinishInit does vkQueueWaitIdle). The built TLAS instance has an identity transform, mask = 0xFF, and the correct BLAS device address.
  • The AS descriptor is written correctly — vkWriteResourceDescriptorsEXT stores the TLAS device address at the expected heap byte offset (verified by dumping the raw heap bytes after the write).
  • The Khronos validation layers (1.4.350, current) report zero errors for the whole frame, including the SBT regions handed to vkCmdTraceRaysKHR.
  • Storage images and buffers bound through the same descriptor heap work — with traceRayEXT removed, the raygen shader's imageStore renders correctly, so the heap binding / image path is sound.
  • Both the ray-tracing pipeline (traceRayEXT) and inline ray query (rayQueryEXT, which uses no shader binding table) fault identically when they read the acceleration structure from the heap. That isolates the fault to the AS-via-heap read, not the SBT or the RT pipeline.
  • The fault reproduces even with the AS descriptor written at heap byte 0 and read at shader index 0 (no descriptor offset/stride ambiguity), and is unaffected by the pAddressRange size.
  • VK_EXT_descriptor_heap is brand new; at the time NVIDIA was the only implementation on this machine that advertised it (llvmpipe did not), so there was no second conformant implementation to cross-check against. Mesa's llvmpipe has it now; see "Status on later drivers" above.

Conclusion: this is a driver-side fault in NVIDIA's VK_EXT_descriptor_heap acceleration-structure path, not an engine bug, and it should be reported to NVIDIA. Until a fixed driver ships, the SPIR-V rewrite above keeps the native RT path working; once it does, remove the workaround and the heap AS read becomes the direct path again.