Texture hasAlpha performance issue

[Dreik]

Recently I enountered an issue with texture has alpha performance. Public attribute 'hasAlpha' is 100 times slower than '_hasAlpha'. Does anyone know why is that and if there is a way to easily fix it? I can't release code to production with private attribute setter.

I made two playground to show the problem.

http://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#9FMJCS - public hasAlpha
80411 ms

http://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#R8QY81 - private _hasAlpha
787 ms

[sable]

https://github.com/BabylonJS/Babylon.js/blob/4b63e18d3dbd31d400fff1cba68de2981f8ba2ee/src/Materials/Textures/babylon.baseTexture.ts#L16

https://github.com/BabylonJS/Babylon.js/blob/4b63e18d3dbd31d400fff1cba68de2981f8ba2ee/src/babylon.scene.ts#L6001

Setting has alpha seems to mark all materials in the scene as dirty. So in this case it's calling markAllMaterialsAsDirty a thousand times, each time with a larger materials array to loop over.

You could get a compromise of behaviour by just setting the private _hasAlpha and then calling markAllMaterialsAsDirty after the loop.

http://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#R8QY81#1

[Dreik]

I know, it would be great if I could do it but I can't use _hasAlpha because the build won't pass. It's an error because it's private.

[sable]

If you're meaning it won't build (i.e. you're using typescript) you can cast to any to get around that (the only downside being if the variable name or behaviour changes in a future version of babylonjs).

[aWeirdo]

Hi,

If you don't need the shader recompile,
you can also add another prototype that doesn't call markAllMaterialsAsDirty

http://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#9FMJCS#1
tests; 3085, 2970, 3156

And even if you do need the recompile, you should be able to just call it after the last one, to only call markAllMaterialsAsDirty once.

http://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#9FMJCS#2
tests; 3432, 3462, 3486

[Dreik]

Wow thank you for the help.

@aWeirdo

I didn't even know that's possible like this.

[Dreik]

@aWeirdo

For some reason typeScript can't see the overwirten property. So I guess I'm off to casting to any.

[aWeirdo]

Ahh typeScript.. i think.. that would require you adding it to the baseTexture source..
I don't know if you can add properties from outside the object in typeScript.
 

public set hasAlphaOverwrite(value: boolean) {
  if (this._hasAlpha === value) {
    return;
  }
  this._hasAlpha = value;
}
public get hasAlphaOverwrite(): boolean {
  return this._hasAlpha;
}

If casting to any also does the trick, then that would probably be better.
Have a nice day  

[Guest]

Or...I can add a boolean that freeze the dirty system for you

Stay tuned!

[Nabroski]

or use a instance or copy (clone)

 

• https://doc.babylonjs.com/how_to/how_to_use_instances
• https://doc.babylonjs.com/extensions/objectcloner
•  

it works at source level way like this: http://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#9FMJCS#3 

[Guest]

here we are: scene.blockMaterialDirtyMechanism = true;

http://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#9FMJCS#4

[Dreik]

You are probably the most hard working person I have ever met @Deltakosh

[Guest]

I want to make sure that our community has all the required tools