WebRender newsletter #29

To introduce this week’s newsletter I’ll write about culling (moved to a separate post).

Notable WebRender and Gecko changes

• Bobby implemented dynamically growing the shared texture cache, cutting by half the remaining regression compared to Firefox without WebRender on the AWSY test.
• Dan did some profiling of the talos test, and identified large data structures being copied a lot on the stack, which led to some of Glenn’s optimizations for this week.
• Dan fixed a crash with huge box shadows.
• Kats fixed an issue with scrollbar dragging on some sites.
• Matt landed his tiled blob image work yielding nice performance improvements on some of the talos tests (45% on tsvg_static and 31% on tsvgr_opacity).
• Matt investigated the telemetry results.
• Andrew fixed a crash.
• Andrew improved animated image frame recycling (will land soon, improves performance).
• Lee fixed related to missing font descriptors.
• Glenn optimized out segment builder no-ops.
• Glenn stored text run outside primitive instances to work around a recent performance regression.
• Glenn moved opacity from per primitive instance to a per template to reduce the size of primitive instances.
• Glenn moved the resolution of opacity bindings to the shaders in order to simplify primitive interning.
• Glenn used primitive interning for text runs.
• Glenn used primitive interning for clears.
• Glenn refactored render task chaining.
• Nical made opacity, gaussian blur, and drop shadow SVG filters use WebRender’s filter infrastructure under some conditions (instead of running on the CPU fall back).
• Nical followed up with making a subset of SVG color matrix filters (the one that aren’t affected by opacity) use WebRender as well.
• Nical investigated a color conversion issue when WebRender is embedded in an application that uses OpenGL in certain ways.
• Sotaro switched presentation to triple buffering

Ongoing work

• Bobby is further improving memory usage by tweaking cache growth and eviction heuristics.
• Kats continues working on asynchronous zoom for android and on evaluating  the remaining work before WebRender can be used on android.
• Kvark is making progress on simplifying the clipping and scrolling APIs.
• Matt keeps investigating performance in general.
• Glenn continues incrementally landing patches towards picture caching.
• Nical is working on blob recoordination.
• Doug is making progress on document splitting.

Enabling WebRender in Firefox Nightly

In about:

• config set “gfx.webrender.all” to true,
• restart Firefox.

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