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| README.md | ||
Multi-threading with Wgpu and Rayon
The main selling point of Vulkan, DirectX 12, Metal, and by extension Wgpu is that these APIs is that they designed from the ground up to be thread safe. Up to this point we have been doing everything on a single thread. That's about to change.
I won't go into what threads are in this tutorial. That is a course in and of itself. All we'll be covering is using threading to make loading resources faster.
We won't go over multithreading rendering as we don't have enough different types of objects to justify that yet. This will change in a coming tutorial
Threading build.rs
If you remember the pipeline tutorial, we created a build script to compile our GLSL shaders to spirv. That had a section in the main function that looked like this.
// This could be parallelized
let shaders = shader_paths.iter_mut()
.flatten()
.map(|glob_result| {
ShaderData::load(glob_result?)
})
.collect::<Vec<Result<_>>>()
.into_iter()
.collect::<Result<Vec<_>>>();
That This could be parallelized comment will soon become This is parallelized. We're going to add a build dependecy to rayon to our Cargo.toml.
[build-dependencies]
anyhow = "1.0"
fs_extra = "1.2"
glob = "0.3"
rayon = "1.4" # NEW!
shaderc = "0.6"
First some housekeeping. Our build.rs code currently uses an array to store the globs to find our projects shaders. We're going to switch to using a Vec to make things play nicer with rayon.
// Collect all shaders recursively within /src/
// UDPATED!
let mut shader_paths = Vec::new();
shader_paths.extend(glob("./src/**/*.vert")?);
shader_paths.extend(glob("./src/**/*.frag")?);
shader_paths.extend(glob("./src/**/*.comp")?);
We'll also need to import rayon as well.
use rayon::prelude::*;
Now we can change our shader source collection code to the following.
// UPDATED!
// This is parallelized
let shaders = shader_paths.into_par_iter()
.map(|glob_result| {
ShaderData::load(glob_result?)
})
.collect::<Vec<Result<_>>>()
.into_iter()
.collect::<Result<Vec<_>>>();
Super simple isn't it? By using into_par_iter, rayon will try to spread our shader loading across multiple threads if it can. This means that our build script will load the shader text source for multiple shaders at the same time. This has the potential to drastically reduce our build times.
We can compare the speeds of our compilation by running cargo build on both this tutorial and the previous one.
$ cargo build --bin tutorial12-camera
Compiling tutorial12-camera v0.1.0 (/home/benjamin/dev/learn-wgpu/code/intermediate/tutorial12-camera)
Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 1m 13s
$ cargo build --bin tutorial13-threading
Compiling tutorial13-threading v0.1.0 (/home/benjamin/dev/learn-wgpu/code/intermediate/tutorial13-threading)
Finished dev [unoptimized + debuginfo] target(s) in 24.33s
Our build speed is a little more than twice as fast!
I got these build speeds after building the project one time to get rayon installed, and then deleting the .spv files from the previous two projects.
Parallelizing loading models and textures
Currently we load the materials and meshes of our model one at a time. This is a perfect opportunity for multithreading! All our changes will be in model.rs. Let's first start with the materials. We'll convert the regular for loop into a par_iter().map().
// model.rs
impl Model {
pub fn load<P: AsRef<Path>>(
device: &wgpu::Device,
queue: &wgpu::Queue,
layout: &wgpu::BindGroupLayout,
path: P,
) -> Result<Self> {
// ...
// UPDATED!
let materials = obj_materials.par_iter().map(|mat| {
// We can also parallelize loading the textures!
let mut textures = [
(containing_folder.join(&mat.diffuse_texture), false),
(containing_folder.join(&mat.normal_texture), true),
].par_iter().map(|(texture_path, is_normal_map)| {
texture::Texture::load(device, queue, texture_path, *is_normal_map)
}).collect::<Result<Vec<_>>>()?;
// Pop removes from the end of the list.
let normal_texture = textures.pop().unwrap();
let diffuse_texture = textures.pop().unwrap();
Ok(Material::new(
device,
&mat.name,
diffuse_texture,
normal_texture,
layout,
))
}).collect::<Result<Vec<Material>>>()?;
// ...
}
// ...
}
Next we can update the meshes to be loaded in parallel.
impl Model {
pub fn load<P: AsRef<Path>>(
device: &wgpu::Device,
queue: &wgpu::Queue,
layout: &wgpu::BindGroupLayout,
path: P,
) -> Result<Self> {
// ...
// UPDATED!
let meshes = obj_models.par_iter().map(|m| {
let mut vertices = (0..m.mesh.positions.len() / 3).into_par_iter().map(|i| {
ModelVertex {
position: [
m.mesh.positions[i * 3],
m.mesh.positions[i * 3 + 1],
m.mesh.positions[i * 3 + 2],
].into(),
tex_coords: [
m.mesh.texcoords[i * 2],
m.mesh.texcoords[i * 2 + 1]
].into(),
normal: [
m.mesh.normals[i * 3],
m.mesh.normals[i * 3 + 1],
m.mesh.normals[i * 3 + 2],
].into(),
// We'll calculate these later
tangent: [0.0; 3].into(),
bitangent: [0.0; 3].into(),
}
}).collect::<Vec<_>>();
// ...
}
// ...
}
// ...
}
We've parallelized loading the meshes, and making the vertex array for them. Propably a bit overkill, but rayon should prevent us from using too many threads.
You'll notice that we didn't use rayon for calculating the tangent, and bitangent. I tried to get it to work, but I was having trouble finding a way to do it without multiple mutable references to vertices. I don't feel like introducing a std::sync::Mutex, so I'll leave it for now.
This is honestly a better job for a compute shader, as the model data is going to get loaded into a buffer anyway.
It's that easy!
Most of the wgpu types are Send + Sync, so we can use them in threads without much trouble. It was so easy, that I feel like this tutorial is too short! I'll just leave off with a speed comparison between the previous model loading code and the current code.
Elapsed (Original): 309.596382ms
Elapsed (Threaded): 199.645027ms
We're not loading that many resources, so the speed up is minimal. We'll be doing more stuff with threading, but this is a good introduction.