Blender Git Commit Log

Fix scalability issue in threaded code of Mesh normals computation.

We tried to do as much as possible in a single threaded callback, which
lead to using some nasty tricks like fake atomic-based spinlocks to
perform some operations (like float addition, which has no atomic
intrinsics).

While OK with 'standard' low number of working threads (8-16), because
collision were rather rare and implied memory barrier not *that* much
overhead, this performed poorly with more powerful systems reaching the
100 of threads and beyond (like workstations or render farm hardware).

There, both memory barrier overhead and more frequent collisions would
have significant impact on performances.

This was addressed by splitting further the process, we now have three
loops, one over polys, loops and vertices, and we added an intermediate
storage for weighted loop normals. This allows to avoid completely any
atomic operation in body of threaded loops, which should fix scalability
issues. This costs us slightly higher temp memory usage (something like
50Mb per million of polygons on average), but looks like acceptable
tradeoff.

Further more, tests showed that we could gain an additional ~7% of speed
in computing normals of heavy meshes, by also parallelizing the last two
loops (might be 1 or 2% on overall mesh update at best...).

Note that further tweaking in this code should be possible once Sergey
adds the 'minimum batch size' option to threaded foreach API, since very
light loops like the one on loops (mere v3 addition) require much bigger
batches than heavier code (like the one on polys) to keep optimal
performances.