OpenGL 3.2 support for luminance!

luminance-0.7

You can’t even imagine how hard it was to release luminance-0.7. I came accross several difficulties I had to spend a lot of time on but finally, here it is. I made a lot of changes for that very special release, and I have a lot to say about it!

Overview

As for all my projects, I always provide people with a changelog. The 0.7 release is a major release (read as: it was a major increment). I think it’s good to tell people what’s new, but it should be mandatory to warn them about what has changed so that they can directly jump to their code and spot the uses of the deprecated / changed interface.

Anyway, you’ll find patch, minor and major changes in luminance-0.7. I’ll describe them in order.

Patch changes

Internal architecture and debugging

A lot of code was reviewed internally. You don’t have to worry about that. However, there’s a new cool thing that was added internally. It could have been marked as a minor change but it’s not supposed to be used by common people – you can use it via a flag if you use cabal or stack though. It’s about debugging the OpenGL part used in luminance. You shouldn’t have to use it but it could be interesting if you spot a bug someday. Anyway, you can enable it with the flag debug-gl.

Uniform Block / Uniform Buffer Objects

The UBO system was buggy and was fixed. You might experience issue with them though. I spotted a bug and reported it – you can find the bug report here. That bug is not Haskell related and is related to the i915 Intel driver.

Minor changes

The minor changes were the most important part of luminance-0.7. luminance now officially supports OpenGL 3.2! When installing luminance, you default to the gl32 backend. You can select the backend you want with flags – gl45 and gl45-bindless-textures – but keep in mind you need the appropriate hardware to be able to use it. Because you need to use flags, you won’t be able to switch to the backend you want at runtime – that’s not the purpose of such a change though.

The performance gap should be minor between gl32 and gl45 but still. Basically, OpenGL 4.5 adds the support for DSA, which is very handy and less ill-designed that previous iterations of OpenGL. So a lot of code had to be rewritten to implement luminance’s stateless interface without breaking performance nor bring them down.

I might add support for other backends later on – like an OpenGL ES backend and WebGL one – but that won’t ship that soon though because I have a ton of work to do, and yet need to provide you with a concrete, beautiful, fast, appealing and eye-blowing demo with luminance! ;)

Feel free to test the gl32 backend and give me back feedback!

However, if I spent so much time on that 0.7 version, it’s because I had issue whilst writing the gl32 backend. Indeed, I spotted several bugs on my Intel HD card. This is my OpenGL version string for my Intel IGP card:

OpenGL core profile version string: 3.3 (Core Profile) Mesa 11.0.4

The architecture is Haswell. And on such a card (i915 linux driver) I’ve found two bugs while trying the gl32 backend with luminance-samples-0.7.

usampler2D

For unknown reason, the Texture sample failed on my Intel IGP but ran smoothly and flawlessly on my nVidia GPU. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I was missing, but eventually changed the sampler type – it’s now a sampler2D – and… it worked. I reported the issue to the intel dev team. So if you hit that error too, please leave a message here so that I can have more hindsight about that error and see what I can do.

Uniform block and vec3

This is a very nasty issue that kept me awoken for days trying to fix my code while it was a driver bug. It’s a big technical, so I’ll just leave a link to the bug tracker so that you can read it if you want to.

Breaking changes

Ok, let’s talk.

When creating a new shader stage, you now have to use the function createStage – instead of several functions like createVertexShader. That change is important so that I can add new shader types without changing the interface, and because some shader can fail to be created. For instance, on the gl32 backend, trying to build a tessellation shader will raise an error.

When a shader stage creation fails, the UnsupportedStage error is raised and holds the type of the stage that failed.

Finally, the interface for the cubemaps changed a bit – you don’t have access to width and height anymore, that was error-prone and useless; you’re stick to a size parameter.

I’d like to thank all people supporting me and luminance. I’ll be watching reactions to that major and important release as it will cover more people with cheaper and well-spread GPUs.

Happy hacking! :)