DelphiTools, SamplingProfiler and General Delphi News
Just before Christmas, the FMXutils DX11 driver received two additions: texture binding support in vertex shaders and GPU device selection.
Vertex shader texture binding enables advanced techniques including displacement mapping and GPU-side heightmaps, which were previously not possible with FMX.
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A new version 24.11.26 of SamplingProfiler is available.
The only significant change in this version is the support for sampling code that is in “.inc” files in addition to regular “.pas” unit files. The file name is now actually tracked from the map file, while previously it was obtained by appending “.pas” to the unit name, so there may also be other files extensions that are supported now.
A couple weeks I added to FMXutils repository a conversion of the “Compute Boids” flocking demo.
This builds upon the WebGPU driver for FireMonkey, but uses a dedicated class where the Compute & rendering shaders are hosted.
Two ping-pong buffers are used to store and updated particle data, which are used to mimic the flocking behavior of birds.
The FMXUtils repository now implements support for GPU Buffers for Delphi FMX (with DX11 or WebGPU).
Adding GPU buffers required some trickery and hackery, but the speedups can be massive: 2x to 3x speedups on low-end integrated GPUs, with reports of 20x (twenty times) speedups on discrete GPUs!
I tried to make the support as easy and backward compatible as possible, while dancing around missing private fields and non-virtual methods. (more…)
Just a quick post to announce the Delphi-WebGPU repository.
What ?
Why ?
To take the words from webgpu-headers:
While WebGPU is a JavaScript API made for the Web, it is a good tradeoff of ergonomic, efficient and portable graphics API. (more…)
With Delphi 12.Community Edition released not too long ago, it was an opportunity to test run what’s possible with FMX on the 3D side.
And while Delphi FireMonkey has 3D support, it’s not really a core feature. For a test run, the simplest of all 3D entities, a point cloud can serve as a decent stress test.
Point Clouds are now ubiquitous with the advent of 3D capture devices, which go from LIDAR to RGB-D cameras and all kinds of AI augmented approaches. So there is a plethora of 3D point cloud datasets out there.
Recent commits to the DWScript repository doubled the compiler performance when compiling many small scripts, like happens in the unit tests suites.
This started from a first profiling run where the memory allocations around the UnicodeLowerCase function came out as top bottlenecks.
Thing is, Pascal being a case-insensitive language, there are lots of case-insensitive comparisons, lookups, searches and hashes, and turns out a key hash code was computed with code like
A tentative new language feature has been pushed to the DWScript repository: “property reintroduce”.
The aim is to allow a method to be reintroduced as a property, and do so in a non-fatal fashion so it can be pushed to production and existing code can be migrated iteratively. (more…)
For quite sometime the issue tracker at BitBucket has been barely usable, and Atlassian does not seem to have bothered fixing it… So if you have issues with DWScript, please now post them on the issues tracker of the GitHub DWScript mirror. (more…)
In the wake of Delphi 12 support, DWScript just got support for the “triple apostrophe” multi-line string syntax introduced with Delphi 12. This syntax comes in addition to the previously supported multi-line syntaxes.
As there is some degree of ambiguity in the new syntax, the syntax in DWScript is based on my current understanding of what the Delphi 12 doc and parser do. (more…)