This is a follow-up of this. 
Yeah well, I was more than optimistic to show those JS guys how fast Flash can be with the help of some brand new Adobe magic – but Pixel Bender was, unfortunately, quite disappointing:
- I spent hours to successfully migrate the code to Pixel Bender Toolkit (wasn’t that difficult actually, but a wrong character there and your math is all screwed up). So here the first letdown: Pixel Bender Toolkit is not a very nice coding environment. It’s a rough baby. But I’d do everything for speed :-)..
- Once I had it running (the above picture is captured from Pixel Bender) I tried to export it for Flash Player. But hoohoo! no support for loops in Flash Player! Yeah, well, ..(and also no custom functions by the way)
- But I didn’t give up. I just calculated how many max loops where needed (about 100) and replicated the while loop with many if-conditions (I love to do computer’s dummy job ;). Then finally: Export to Flash Player! But in Flash Player having the shader as Filter for a BitmapData just really fucked up the rendering. I even went down to 1fps, but still no luck. What a bummer! (sometimes I saw a few pixels blue, but very unusable: I’ve written to the Pixel Bender Forum - invited by @Pixelbender – but that led to nothing so far).
- Today, finally, I got it working by taking a more rough approach (not BitmapFilter, but ShaderJob). But hell is it slow!!! And it eats all my 8 cpu cores!! So I wondered how that could be: Fast as hell in Pixel Bender Toolkit (uses may be 2% of my cpu at full fps!), but slow as hell in Flash Player?! The answer is obvious: Adobe decided not to talk to the GCU (Graphics Card) for the calculations, probably to keep the Flash Player be as platform independent as possible - and as small as possible. But then I wonder.. WTF do you give us this toy if we can’t use it?!! It’s like Apple would say: «Great news: we have Core Graphics on the iPhone - without hardware acceleration..» Adobe, to me, this doesn’t make too much sense. (But I’m so very much pleased about the new Text Engine – that was a good job)
Here the result: (Click to start, it’ll eat your cpu!)
And for the geeks, here we go with the source codes:
kernel MetaTunnel
< namespace : "com.betabong";
vendor : "Betabong";
version : 1;
description : "MetaTunnel Port";
>
{
parameter int size
<
minValue: 16;
maxValue: 512;
defaultValue: 128;
>;
parameter float time
<
minValue: float( 0.0 );
maxValue: float( 15.0 );
defaultValue: float( 0.0 );
>;
input image4 src;
output pixel3 dst;
void
evaluatePixel()
{
float cos1 = cos( time );
float cos0_5 = cos(time * 0.5);
float cos0_7 = cos(time * 0.7);
float sin1 = sin( time );
float sin0_2 = sin(time * 0.2);
float sin_0_5 = sin(time * 0.5);
float dim = float( size );
float2 point = outCoord() / dim;
if ( point.x > 1.0 || point.y > 1.0 ) {
dst.rgb = float3( 1.0 , 1.0 , 1.0 );
} else {
float2 vp = float2( point.x * 2.0 - 1.0 , -point.y * 2.0 + 1.0 );
float s = float( 0.4 );
float3 op = float3( vp.x , vp.y * 1.25 , 0.0 );
float3 dp = float3( (vp.x + cos1 * 0.3) / 64.0 , vp.y/64.0 , 1.0/64.0 );
float f = float( 1.0 );
float tt = float( 0.0 );
float g = float( 1.0 );
float3 p = float3(1.0,1.0,1.0);
while ( (g > s) && (tt<375.0) ) {
p = op + ( dp * tt );
f = 1.0;
f *= abs( distance( float3( cos1+sin0_2 , 0.3 , 2.0+cos0_5*0.5 ) , p ) );
f *= abs( distance( float3( -cos0_7 , 0.3 , 2.0+sin_0_5 ) , p ) );
f *= abs( distance( float3( -sin0_2*0.5 , sin1 , 2.0 ) , p ) );
f *= cos(p.y)*cos(p.x) - 0.1 - cos( p.z*7.0 + time*7.0 ) *cos(p.x*3.0)*cos(p.y*4.0)*0.1;
g = f;
tt += g * 4.0;
}
float color = 0.0;
float3 dtt = op + ( dp * tt);
p = float3( dtt.x , dtt.y , dtt.z );
f = 1.0;
f *= distance( float3( cos1+sin0_2 , 0.3 , 2.0+cos0_5*0.5 ) , p );
f *= distance( float3( -cos0_7 , 0.3 , 2.0+sin_0_5 ) , p );
f *= distance( float3( -sin0_2*0.5 , sin1 , 2.0 ) , p );
f *= cos(p.y)*cos(p.x)-0.1-cos(p.z*7.0+time*7.0)*cos(p.x*3.0)*cos(p.y*4.0)*0.1;
float objd = f;
float3 np = float3( 0.0,0.0,0.0 );
p = float3( dtt.x + 0.01 , dtt.y , dtt.z );
f = 1.0;
f *= distance( float3( cos1+sin0_2 , 0.3 , 2.0+cos0_5*0.5 ) , p );
f *= distance( float3( -cos0_7 , 0.3 , 2.0+sin_0_5 ) , p );
f *= distance( float3( -sin0_2*0.5 , sin1 , 2.0 ) , p );
f *= cos(p.y)*cos(p.x)-0.1-cos(p.z*7.0+time*7.0)*cos(p.x*3.0)*cos(p.y*4.0)*0.1;
np.x = objd - f;
p = float3( dtt.x , dtt.y + 0.01 , dtt.z );
f = 1.0;
f *= distance( float3( cos1+sin0_2 , 0.3 , 2.0+cos0_5*0.5 ) , p );
f *= distance( float3( -cos0_7 , 0.3 , 2.0+sin_0_5 ) , p );
f *= distance( float3( -sin0_2*0.5 , sin1 , 2.0 ) , p );
f *= cos(p.y)*cos(p.x)-0.1-cos(p.z*7.0+time*7.0)*cos(p.x*3.0)*cos(p.y*4.0)*0.1;
np.y = objd - f;
p = float3( dtt.x , dtt.y , dtt.z + 0.01 );
f = 1.0;
f *= distance( float3( cos1+sin0_2 , 0.3 , 2.0+cos0_5*0.5 ) , p );
f *= distance( float3( -cos0_7 , 0.3 , 2.0+sin_0_5 ) , p );
f *= distance( float3( -sin0_2*0.5 , sin1 , 2.0 ) , p );
f *= cos(p.y)*cos(p.x)-0.1-cos(p.z*7.0+time*7.0)*cos(p.x*3.0)*cos(p.y*4.0)*0.1;
np.z = objd - f;
float d = length( np );
np.y /= d;
np.z /= d;
color = max( -0.5 * np.z , 0.0 ) + max( -0.5 *np.y + 0.5 * np.z , 0.0 ) * 0.5;
float3 rgb = float3(color + 0.1 * tt * 0.025 , color + 0.2 * tt * 0.025 , color + 0.5 * tt * 0.025 );
rgb.x = max( 0.0 , min( 1.0 , rgb.x ) );
rgb.y = max( 0.0 , min( 1.0 , rgb.y ) );
rgb.z = max( 0.0 , min( 1.0 , rgb.z ) );
dst.rgb = rgb;
}
}
}
And here the Actionscript part:
package
{
import flash.display.*;
import flash.events.*;
import flash.filters.*;
import flash.net.*;
import flash.utils.ByteArray;
import net.hires.debug.Stats;
// SWF Metadata
[SWF(width = "520", height = "128", backgroundColor = "#000000", framerate = "1")]
public class MetaTunnelBender extends Sprite {
[Embed("test/MetaTunnel-stupid.pbj", mimeType = "application/octet-stream")]
private var TestFilter: Class;
private var playing : Boolean;
private var im: Bitmap;
private var job:ShaderJob;
private var shader: Shader;
private var shaderfilter:ByteArray;
private var time:Number = 0.0;
private const SIZE:Number = 64;
private const WHITE:BitmapData = new BitmapData( SIZE , SIZE , false , 0xffffff );
public function MetaTunnelBender() : void {
stage.frameRate = 20;
im = new Bitmap( WHITE.clone() );
im.scaleX = im.scaleY = 2;
addChild(im);
// stat info
var s:DisplayObject = new Stats();
addChild( s );
s.x = 128;
Comments
Jackson Dunstan: I get about 8 FPS on a 3.0 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo on Windows XP. Your AS3 version is a ton faster, although there is no framerate counter so I can’t quantify that.
Og2t: Nice try though! The unrolled IFs might be a problem. Try http://www.simppa.fi/source/LoopMacros.pbk
betabong: Like that macro. If I ever find time to play around with Pixel Bender, I’ll give it a try. Cheers!
Christian: I’m having no noticable CPU usage and I’m getting 13fps.