2025-01-20 Viewport & EEVEE Module Meeting

Meetings
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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: 27 January 2025, 11:30 AM to 12:00 PM Amsterdam Time (Your local time: 2025-01-27T10:30:00Z → 2025-01-27T11:00:00Z)

Attendees

  • Clement
  • James
  • Jeroen
  • Miguel

Fixing bugs

Last month a large set of selection, overlay bugs were solved. There are still a few left that needs some input from Clement to see what the best way is to solve them.

There was also a discussion to guard against misuse of the draw manager API. sometimes extraction or drawing fails because the input mesh isn’t consistent. Guarding against this will show the issue during development, results in better triaging and a clearer understanding what is supported and not. This requires more time to flesh out how this could be added without less runtime overhead. Asserts is one thing that comes to mind.

Platform support

There are two known compiler issues with the new shader/CPP structure. One for Apple/AMD RX5500 [#132663 - Object selection in viewport is broken on select platforms - blender - Blender Projects] and the other for AMD Radeon RX530M [#132968 - ERROR (gpu.shader): gpu_shader_2D_widget_base FragShader - blender - Blender Projects], which doesn’t seem to be a polaris architecture. We should investiate and check how we will deal with these platform issues.

Metal

  • Regression test failing when running on buildbot. The cause is that buildbot works on MacOS 13 which doesn’t support atomic textures. It falls back to device atomics. However fixing the issues now timeouts the command buffer. Command buffer timeouts happened in the past on the buildbot but couldn’t reproduce on our development systems.
  • [#133304 - Metal: Force workarounds using `--debug-gpu-force-workarounds` - blender - Blender Projects] Metal backend doesn’t have an option to force workarounds. We should start adding them as well.
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Are there any plans to tackle shader compilation times? In my daily usage, I often wait over 10 seconds for a shader to compile, even though some shaders are quite simple like Principled Shader.

Obviously these issues don’t arise with simple scenes, but I do get these long compilation times in production work. Here is a video that demonstrates the issue. The compilation takes like 10+ seconds. During this time, only one core is working on the shader compiling, my settings are set to use 22 cores, and I have i9-12900 + 3080 TI which performs very similarly to the 3090.

The shader that was clicked for preview
blender_rOEjbbNi9s

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