Practical Info
This is a weekly video chat meeting for planning and discussion of Blender EEVEE/viewport module development. Any contributor (developer, UI/UX designer, writer, …) working on EEVEE/viewport in Blender is welcome to join.
For users and other interested parties, we ask to read the meeting notes instead so that the meeting can remain focused.
- Google Meet
- Next Meeting: January 22, 2023, 11:30 AM to 12:00 PM Amsterdam Time (Your local time: 2024-01-22T10:30:00Z → 2024-01-22T11:00:00Z)
Attendees:
- Brecht
- Jeroen
- Miguel
- Thomas
EEVEE
- Added support for specialization constants to the OpenGL backend. This allows shaders to be optimized based by compiling pre-configured variables as constants. [#116926 - OpenGL: Specialization Constants - blender - Blender Projects]
- EEVEE Next performance is getting better, but there are still some iterations to be made. Shadow rendering is one of the areas that needs more work.
- In the shadowing pipeline there is a read back to CPU, which has a performance penalty. This readback is used to inform the user that the shadow map update isn’t complete yet and requires more EEVEE will perform more samples for completion. During the meeting we discussed ways how informing users can be done directly on the GPU.
- The GPU profiling patch should be reviewed and land in main to help finding areas that need to be improved. The profiling patch is more accurate than some tools provide as it measures the performance from Blender point of view. Tools sometimes only measures pipeline scheduling or closer to GPU which leads to different figures.
- Metal backend has several regressions.
- Atomic fallback for Intel iGPUs doesn’t compile. Apple has provided some feedback how to fix these issues and we will be looking into fixing them
- Light buffers can allocate buffers with zero length, which is invalid. Could be a cause why lights aren’t visible. But that needs more investigation.
- Next time when a commit makes EEVEE-Next unusable the developers should just revert that change. It is common practice and would ensure that other developments can continue.
- We shortly discussed what needs to be done, in case we decide to post-pone EEVEE to Blender 4.2. It seems fairly straight forward, changing UI, hide EEVEE-Next render option, switch back to EEVEE-Legacy when EEVEE-Next isn’t available.
Workbench
- Some workbench and overlays regressions have been fixed (volume drawing, overlay drawing)
- There are some ideas about improving wireframe drawings. Unclear when that will be worked on.