Question

I am trying to make “burning star” impression on android game I have been developing with little help of noise function (simplex noise in this case). Unfortunately I cant use 3d textures as they are in gles extension and android packages doesn’t have them included.

Only option left for me is therefore calculating noise function in fragment shader. Code provided below runs smoothly or acceptably (20-60fps) on HTC Desire Z andLG optimus one. With same program on Motorola XOOM (which have tegra2 chipset) however I get fraction(1-3) of fps even when displaying only small part of object.

Thing we tried so far:

• meddling with precision(lowp-higp), both in first line directive and specifying for each occurrence of float/vec separately

• commenting parts of noise function – it seem that there isn’t any particular bottleneck, its combination of all things together

• googling problems related to tegra, floating point in shaders etc

This is stripped down part of code needed for reproduction of this behavior. Note that on XOOM there are some artifacts which we believe is caused by 16bit floating operations in tegra.

precision mediump float;
#define pi 3.141592653589793238462643383279     


//
// Description : Array and textureless GLSL 2D/3D/4D simplex
// noise functions.
// Author : Ian McEwan, Ashima Arts.
// Maintainer : ijm
// Lastmod : 20110822 (ijm)
// License : Copyright (C) 2011 Ashima Arts. All rights reserved.
// Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE file.
// https://github.com/ashima/webgl-noise
//

vec3 mod289(vec3 x) {
  return x - floor(x * (1.0 / 289.0)) * 289.0;
}

vec4 mod289(vec4 x) {
  return x - floor(x * (1.0 / 289.0)) * 289.0;
}

vec4 permute(vec4 x) {
     return mod289(((x*34.0)+1.0)*x);
}

vec4 taylorInvSqrt(vec4 r)
{
  return 1.79284291400159 - 0.85373472095314 * r;
}

float snoise(vec3 v)
  {
  const vec2 C = vec2(1.0/6.0, 1.0/3.0) ;
  const vec4 D = vec4(0.0, 0.5, 1.0, 2.0);

// First corner
  vec3 i = floor(v + dot(v, C.yyy) );
  vec3 x0 = v - i + dot(i, C.xxx) ;

// Other corners
  vec3 g = step(x0.yzx, x0.xyz);
  vec3 l = 1.0 - g;
  vec3 i1 = min( g.xyz, l.zxy );
  vec3 i2 = max( g.xyz, l.zxy );

  // x0 = x0 - 0.0 + 0.0 * C.xxx;
  // x1 = x0 - i1 + 1.0 * C.xxx;
  // x2 = x0 - i2 + 2.0 * C.xxx;
  // x3 = x0 - 1.0 + 3.0 * C.xxx;
  vec3 x1 = x0 - i1 + C.xxx;
  vec3 x2 = x0 - i2 + C.yyy; // 2.0*C.x = 1/3 = C.y
  vec3 x3 = x0 - D.yyy; // -1.0+3.0*C.x = -0.5 = -D.y

// Permutations
  i = mod289(i);
  vec4 p = permute( permute( permute(
             i.z + vec4(0.0, i1.z, i2.z, 1.0 ))
           + i.y + vec4(0.0, i1.y, i2.y, 1.0 ))
           + i.x + vec4(0.0, i1.x, i2.x, 1.0 ));

// Gradients: 7x7 points over a square, mapped onto an octahedron.
// The ring size 17*17 = 289 is close to a multiple of 49 (49*6 = 294)
  float n_ = 0.142857142857; // 1.0/7.0
  vec3 ns = n_ * D.wyz - D.xzx;

  vec4 j = p - 49.0 * floor(p * ns.z * ns.z); // mod(p,7*7)

  vec4 x_ = floor(j * ns.z);
  vec4 y_ = floor(j - 7.0 * x_ ); // mod(j,N)

  vec4 x = x_ *ns.x + ns.yyyy;
  vec4 y = y_ *ns.x + ns.yyyy;
  vec4 h = 1.0 - abs(x) - abs(y);

  vec4 b0 = vec4( x.xy, y.xy );
  vec4 b1 = vec4( x.zw, y.zw );

  //vec4 s0 = vec4(lessThan(b0,0.0))*2.0 - 1.0;
  //vec4 s1 = vec4(lessThan(b1,0.0))*2.0 - 1.0;
  vec4 s0 = floor(b0)*2.0 + 1.0;
  vec4 s1 = floor(b1)*2.0 + 1.0;
  vec4 sh = -step(h, vec4(0.0));

  vec4 a0 = b0.xzyw + s0.xzyw*sh.xxyy ;
  vec4 a1 = b1.xzyw + s1.xzyw*sh.zzww ;

  vec3 p0 = vec3(a0.xy,h.x);
  vec3 p1 = vec3(a0.zw,h.y);
  vec3 p2 = vec3(a1.xy,h.z);
  vec3 p3 = vec3(a1.zw,h.w);

//Normalise gradients
  vec4 norm = taylorInvSqrt(vec4(dot(p0,p0), dot(p1,p1), dot(p2, p2), dot(p3,p3)));
  p0 *= norm.x;
  p1 *= norm.y;
  p2 *= norm.z;
  p3 *= norm.w;

// Mix final noise value
  vec4 m = max(0.6 - vec4(dot(x0,x0), dot(x1,x1), dot(x2,x2), dot(x3,x3)), 0.0);
  m = m * m;
  return 42.0 * dot( m*m, vec4( dot(p0,x0), dot(p1,x1),
                                dot(p2,x2), dot(p3,x3) ) );
  }


uniform vec3 color1;
uniform vec3 color2;                        

uniform float t;

varying vec3 vTextureCoord;

void main()
{
    float t = 0.5; //mod(t, 3.0);
    float x = (vTextureCoord.x)*2.0;    
    float y = -(vTextureCoord.y)*2.0;                
    float r = sqrt(x * x + y * y);          

    gl_FragColor = vec4(0.0,0.0,0.0,0.0);   

    if(r<= 1.0){                                
        float n = snoise( vec3(vec2(x,y), Mr_T*3.3 ) );

        gl_FragColor = vec4( mix(color1,color2, abs(n) ) ,1.0);
    }

}

Answer 1

I was facing the same problem for tegra2 a while ago. Read 1.3 : http://www.opengl.org/wiki/GLSL_:_common_mistakes. and feel the pain. In my case fps went up twice but it still sucked.