bevyengine
Add options to lower precision/compressed vertex buffer
Objective
Resolves #21902.
Solution
This PR adopts a relatively transparent approach to reduce the GPU vertex buffer size. On CPU-side mesh can still use uncompressed Float32 data, and users are not required to insert compressed vertex formats. The vertex data is automatically processed into lower-precision/octahedral encoded data when uploading to the GPU.
To enable vertex attribute compression, just set the attribute_compression field of Mesh, or set mesh_attribute_compression of GltfLoaderSettings. If enabled, normal and tangent will be octahedral encoded Unorm16x2, uv0, uv1, joint weight and color will be corresponding Unorm16 or Float16. I also provide Unorm8x4 for vertex color if hdr isn't needed.
Testing
I tested with several 2d and 3d examples and it seems to work.
This will need some thinking on how it interacts with Virtual Geometry and Solari, which rely on hardcoded vertex formats.
For the octahedral normals and tangents, encoding as UNORM16 or SNORM16 should give better accuracy? Unless there's some compatibility or performance reason to prefer floats.
For joint weights, I'd similarly suggest UNORM16. Unless Bevy wants to support joints weights greater than one - I don't know of any engine that does this. For bonus points it should also adjusted the encoded weights to make sure they sum to one.
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@beicause, I noticed that you also changed the UVs from FLOAT16 to UNORM16. That might be a problem for some assets since it's legitimate for UVs to be outside the [0, 1] range.
I'm not sure what the best option is for UVs, so maybe worth seeing if someone else has an opinion. From a glance it seems like Unreal supports FLOAT16/32. Godot does use UNORM16 but scales them to fit the maximum value if they're outside of [0, 1] (ref 1, ref 2).
Also, could the PR description say whether compression is enabled by default? The description currently sounds like it's disabled by default, but the code seems like it's enabled by default. I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm guessing most people would prefer it to be disabled by default.
I think using float16 for UVs is worthwhile because the benefits of unorm16 may be limited after thought.
I would probably like to enable compression by default, as other engines seem to do this by default as well. Enabling compression generally provides a net benefit, and users can opt-out if issues arise.
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Added X-Contentious as I expect there'll be various opinions on enabling by default. Also added C-Dependencies as the PR adds a dependency on half to bevy_mesh - although I'm not sure if the label is appropriate since half is already used by bevy_image.
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Some quick drive by thoughts:
- f16 UVs are definitely dangerous. We should probably avoid enabling that one by default.
- f16 positions would be great to have. I'd like to use them in Solari.
- We should take advantage of the f16 type in wgsl shaders where we can and where it's beneficial) to save registers
For positions, I'd suggest an AABB-relative unorm16 instead of f16. It's a faff to set up but the worst case error is much lower. I've seen both tried for moderate to high poly characters, and the f16 version had noticeable artifacts.
The reason I suggest f16 is that it's one of the few supported BLAS formats for raytracing https://github.com/Vecvec/wgpu/blob/3e9ede6c38012d6c134e1ced689ded2f58dec49f/wgpu-types/src/features.rs#L1497-L1501, and it has pretty significant improvements over f32 https://zeux.io/2025/03/31/measuring-acceleration-structures/
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I've added snorm16 positions relative to AABB. Its precision should be as good as unorm16. And it seems that the BLAS supports it?
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This deserves a thorough review by me, but I unfortunately won't have time for the next while due to work. Apologies - it's something I'm definitely excited to land though!
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