Winding 1.6.1

Off means off, for every scene. A sweep of every feature for work done with nothing to do,
beyond the scenes the last release was measured on -- occlusion culling with nothing to cull, the
sky under everything, OIT and depth of field with nothing to show, texture lookups a material does
not have, an idle character that cost a scene its static fast paths -- then of hitches and of scene
types not yet measured: merged meshes drawn direct, cut-out foliage, adds and removes, animated
materials, splats under TAA. Each fix A/B'd, the same pixels but for a few at exact depth ties.
Sponza GPU -24% against 1.6.0, measured in one page; a town of untextured buildings -12% to
-24%; 10,000 objects and an idle character, CPU -40%. And nothing builds up: a soak of everything an
app repeats, now part of the GPU suite, found and closed a dozen leaks.

Changed

• Off means off, for more than Sponza. A sweep of every feature for work done when it has
  nothing to do; each fix A/B'd on Sponza (with OIT, ambient occlusion or depth of field on) and a
  town of 900 buildings, the same pixels throughout (one channel moved by one level, from grading).
  • Occlusion culling's depth pyramid, second cull and second pass are skipped when every opaque
    mesh is merged, as they are culled by view alone. Sponza: GPU -8%; the town: -13% to -24%.
  • The sky is drawn after the opaque geometry, where nothing covers it, instead of under all of
    it first.
  • With oit on, a frame with nothing blended in view skips its two
    full-screen targets, its pass and its resolve; with it off, the separate blend pass is skipped too.
  • Depth of field whose largest blur is a pixel or less skips its three
    passes: the composite took the sharp colour everywhere. Sponza at f/22 focused at 10 m: GPU -21%.
  • The tonemap skips colour grading's white balance, contrast and saturation when they are neutral.
  • A material with none of the metallic-roughness, normal and occlusion maps skips their lookups
    and the normal map's basis, and one with no emissive map skips that lookup; what they would give
    is known. A town of untextured buildings: main pass -17%, GPU -12%. Textured Sponza: unchanged.
    An untextured surface's normal is now exactly its own: the 1x1 default decoded a hair off flat
    (4 channels in the town's frame moved by up to 2 levels).
  • A skinned or morphed mesh standing still costs what a static one does. A skin's bounds counted
    as changed every frame, posed or not, so one idle character had every frame re-union every
    box in the scene, rewrite every deforming object's draw data and rebuild the shadow casters'
    boxes. Now only a box that changed counts. 10,000 boxes and one idle Fox: CPU -40% a frame;
    the same pixels. Walking, as before.
  • Light clustering runs neither of its passes in a scene with no point or spot lights and no
    decals, once a frame has cleared the counts it leaves.
  • The pass that picks the shadow casters' levels of detail is skipped on frames that draw no
    shadow map.
  • TAA turned off frees its two full-size history images (15 MB at
    720p, 33 MB at 1080p); turned on again, it makes them anew.
• Merged meshes are drawn with direct draws. A merged group's triangle count and place never
  change between rebuilds -- a hidden part keeps its place as degenerate triangles -- so its draws
  need not be indirect, and an indirect draw pays the browser's validation. Sponza: GPU -12% to
  -17%. Their depth prepass also reads the position alone, not the whole vertex: another 3-5%.
  The same pixels.
• Adding or removing an object no longer redraws every shadow map. Only the maps its box
  reaches are redrawn, as for anything that moves -- a new object's box no longer starts as the one
  last in its slot, which reached maps it did not. Its rebuild also allocates less. A town of 900
  buildings, one box added: that frame 16.9 -> 14.5 ms, against 6.0 steady; the same shadows as a
  full redraw. The rest is the batches and merged lists rebuilt whole, for a later release.
• Cut-out foliage shades each pixel once. An alpha-masked merged group draws a depth prepass
  that discards what its mask cuts, then shades with an equal depth test and no discard, so early-Z
  drops the leaves behind a leaf. 1,200 double-sided leaf quads, each its own mesh: main pass -6%.
  Instanced foliage is unchanged.
• An animated colour, glow or roughness no longer redraws every shadow map. Only a masked or
  blended material's change can reshape a shadow; an opaque one casts depth alone.
• Splats under TAA sort only when the view moves. The sort was decided by the projection with
  TAA's jitter in it, which moves every frame, so a still camera re-sorted every cloud each frame.
• The pipelines that build texture mips are built at start, in the background, not on the
  first texture streamed in during play.

Fixed

• Nothing builds up, checked for good. A soak of everything an app does over and over --
  models loaded and unloaded, scenes made and dropped, spawning, every feature on and off, lights,
  sprites, text, particles, decals, environments, render targets, probes, 2D levels, whole engines
  made and destroyed -- counting every GPU buffer and texture to its destroy(), every pipeline and
  shader made, and that everything let go of is collected. It is now a step of the GPU suite. What
  it found:
  • Every environment loaded and every probe captured compiled its shaders anew, and the
    pipelines they keyed stayed in the cache for good: three for each; every render target, two.
    They are compiled once a device now, and the same sky once.
  • A removed reflection probe kept its slot, so removing and recapturing probes doubled the
    cube array again and again (+12 MB in six rounds of the soak). Slots are reused, and a scene's
    last probe removed frees the array.
  • A dropped 2D scene's GPU buffers waited for garbage collection -- which GPU memory does not
    prompt -- with the scene's ~650 KB of heap, and the first 2D scene was held for good. A 2D
    scene's buffers are now freed 120 frames after it was last drawn.
  • A destroyed engine stayed alive through a canvas the page kept, as a component that remounts
    or an editor that reuses it does: the context still named the device, and a listener on the
    device everything else. The canvas is unconfigured and the listeners removed.
  • A loaded model kept its whole file: its JSON and every buffer, 9.4 MB of heap for Sponza;
    0.4 MB now. source on a model is null.
  • The decal texture array was kept after the last decal was removed, and the sprite pass held the
    last texture and font it drew; a 3D scene's set of changed sprites kept every entity ever
    changed. Each is let go of now.
  • A font's atlas grew for good: a glyph once drawn was kept, and a script laid out a word at a
    time adds one for every new word, so changing text doubled the atlas until it passed the device's
    limit and threw. At 4096 by 4096 it starts again, empty, and text on screen draws its glyphs back
    before it is packed; the kerning memo is bounded too.
  • Point and spot shadow layers were kept at the most ever on screen: twelve shadowed point
    lights left 128 layers, 128 MB at the default size, after they were gone. Under a quarter used
    for 120 frames, the array shrinks to what is drawn.
  • A clip joined over and over -- a hit reaction, a footstep -- added a track each time, kept
    and sampled for good once finished. Joining a clip replaces a finished run of it; past 64 tracks
    on a layer the console says so.
  • A 2D view kept the padded copy of every tileset it had drawn, unloaded or not; the particle pass
    and the job system held the last scene drawn. Each is let go of now.

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npm install winding-engine