Practical Info
This is a weekly video chat meeting for planning and discussion of Blender Viewport & EEVEE module development. Any contributor (developer, UI/UX designer, writer, …) working on Viewport & EEVEE 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: 20 January 2025, 11:30 AM to 12:00 PM Amsterdam Time (Your local time: 2025-01-20T10:30:00Z → 2025-01-20T11:00:00Z)
Attendees
- Clement
- James
- Jeroen
- Miguel
Discussion topic: Removal of geometry shader support
Geometry shaders have been used in Blender to support wide line rendering and to implement fallbacks & driver workarounds. Metal devices don’t support geometry shaders and used a workaround that only uses vertex shaders. In Blender 4.4 this has been rewritten into a common API (called primitive expansion).
During the meeting we discussed if and how we will be supporting geometry shaders in the future. Areas that can still use geometry shaders are add-ons and workarounds.
** Add-on **
We will perform some query in github to detect if geometry shaders are used. We doubt that there are add-ons/extensions actually using it. Based on this outcome we will remove geometry shaders from the Python API or add a deprecation warning that geometry shaders will be removed in the near future.
** Internal API **
We will remove geometry shaders from our internal API. Any user code in our code base will not be allowed anymore. Internally GPU backends can still use geometry shaders to work around missing GPU features for example bary-centric coordinates.
Code quality
- Image engine has been ported to the new draw manager.
- Old draw manager and related code has been removed. Some areas did still use the old draw manager unexpectedly and were refactored to use the new draw manager.
- [#131339 - GPU: Shader Code Base Design - blender - Blender Projects] A task has been written with the current pain points in our shading code base. It contains some solutions and feedback is asked to see what direction to take.
- [#131511 - WIP: GPU: Experimental shader code organization - blender - Blender Projects] Contains a prototype for part of the proposal.
- [#131580 - Metal: Fix race condition in msl_patch_default_get - blender - Blender Projects] Fix a race condition, that occurs when running GPU tests.
- A possible related issue is that in OpenGL the first sample could use the default material shader when using parallel compilation.
- Python rendering frame boundaries to track resources fix.
- Reduced the warnings and errors when compiling shaders in CPP (validation & IDE integration).
- Regressions and memory leaks.
- Update overlay-next to use new shader create info.
Next meeting
The next meeting is planned on 20th of January due to the holiday seasons.