O'Boyle, Michael

Komura, Taku

Franke, Bjoern

Crawford, Lewis

2022-10-11T14:38:10Z

2022-10-11T14:38:10Z

2022-10-11

In the field of real-time graphics for computer games, performance has a significant effect on the player’s enjoyment and immersion. Graphics processing units (GPUs) are hardware accelerators that run small parallelized shader programs to speed up computationally expensive rendering calculations. This thesis examines optimizing shader programs and explores ways in which data patterns on both the CPU and GPU can be analyzed to automatically speed up rendering in games. Initially, the effect of traditional compiler optimizations on shader source-code was explored. Techniques such as loop unrolling or arithmetic reassociation provided speed-ups on several devices, but different GPU hardware responded differently to each set of optimizations. Analyzing execution traces from numerous popular PC games revealed that much of the data passed from CPU-based API calls to GPU-based shaders is either unused, or remains constant. A system was developed to capture this constant data and fold it into the shaders’ source-code. Re-running the game’s rendering code using these specialized shader variants resulted in performance improvements in several commercial games without impacting their visual quality.

https://hdl.handle.net/1842/39423

http://dx.doi.org/10.7488/era/2673

en

The University of Edinburgh

Lewis Crawford and Michael O’Boyle. A cross-platform evaluation of graphics shader compiler optimization. In Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS), 2018 IEEE International Symposium on, pages 219–228. IEEE, 2018.

Lewis Crawford and Michael O’Boyle. Specialization opportunities in graphical workloads. In 2019 28th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT), pages 272–283. IEEE, 2019.

compiler optimization

graphics

shaders

GPU

Shader optimization and specialization

Thesis or Dissertation

Doctoral

PhD Doctor of Philosophy