Tag Archives: glm

Cross platform development for OpenGL, CUDA and friends

This is a small practical article about my development setup for Windows and Linux. I’m usually developing cross platform, because it doesn’t add much work and I’m switching from time to time between those systems. Both of them have advantages and disadvantages for me, but I don’t want to go into details here.

For version control I use Mercurial along with bitbucket. I prefer Mercurial over git for a simple reason, there is a very good open source GUI client for both operating systems, namely TortoiseHG. For git there are a few Windows clients, but I didn’t find any Linux one that I liked. Bitbucket is cool, because they provide the usual code hosting plans, mercurial and git hosting, optional bug tracker, wiki, code browsing and more.

The next thing is a cross platform build system: CMake. Most Linux and cross platform IDEs support it and it’s easy to generate a Visual Studio project out of it. Here is the code for the build file of my latest project. It includes OpenGL, CUDA and some other libraries. You can use it as a template.

project(firefly)

#this is my project structure
# ~/firefly/src/CMakeLists.txt   (this file)
# ~/firefly/src/main.cpp         (and other source files, there are also subdirectories)
# ~/firefly/data/..              (shaders, music, model data..)
# ~firefly/linlib/lib/..         (linux libs not installed on the system, usually .so and .a files)
# ~firefly/winlib/lib/..         (windows libs not installed on the system, usually .lib and .a files)
# ~/firefly/*inlib/include/..    (header files libs not installed on the system)
# ~/firefly/build/..             (not committed to the version control system, names vary, created by cmake.
                                  .dll files need to by copied here, there must be a cmake command which could do that but I did it manually)
# ~/firefly/documentation/..     (optional documentation, reports for uni etc.)

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.6)
cmake_policy(SET CMP0015 OLD)

#find_package(Qt4 REQUIRED)
find_package(OpenGL REQUIRED)
find_package(CUDA REQUIRED)

#include_directories(${CMAKE_SYSTEM_INCLUDE_PATH} ${QT_INCLUDES} ${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR} ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR})
include_directories(${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR} ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR} ../include)

if(CMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME STREQUAL "Linux")
  link_directories(/usr/lib /usr/local/lib ../linlib/lib)

  # otherwise some bullet internal headers don't find friends..
  include_directories(/usr/local/include/bullet /usr/include/bullet ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/../linlib/include /usr/local/cuda/include)
else()
  #windows
  include_directories(${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/../winlib/include ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/../winlib/include/bullet)
  link_directories(${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/../winlib/lib)
endif()

set(project_SRCS
#list all source and header files here. separate files either by spaces or newlines
main.cpp
Class.cpp  Class.h
..
)

#shaders, optional, will be shown in the IDE, but not compiled
file(GLOB RES_FILES
../data/shader/Filename.frag
../data/shader/Filename.vert
)

#set(CUDA_NVCC_FLAGS ${CUDA_NVCC_FLAGS} -O3 --use_fast_math -gencode arch=compute_20,code=sm_21 --maxrregcount 32)
#set(CUDA_NVCC_FLAGS ${CUDA_NVCC_FLAGS} "--use_fast_math -gencode arch=compute_20,code=sm_20 -lineinfo -G")   #-G for cuda debugger
#set(CUDA_NVCC_FLAGS ${CUDA_NVCC_FLAGS} "--use_fast_math -gencode arch=compute_20,code=sm_21 -lineinfo")
set(CUDA_NVCC_FLAGS ${CUDA_NVCC_FLAGS} "--use_fast_math -gencode arch=compute_20,code=sm_21 -lineinfo --maxrregcount 32")

if(CMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME STREQUAL "Linux")
   #"-D VIENNA_DEBUG" defines the preprocessor variable VIENNA_DEBUG
#   set(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS "-D VIENNA_DEBUG -D VIENNA_LINUX -std=c++11")
   set(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS "-D VIENNA_LINUX -std=c++11")
   set(CUDA_NVCC_FLAGS ${CUDA_NVCC_FLAGS} " -std=c++11")
else()
   #"/DVIENNA_DEBUG" defines the preprocessor variable VIENNA_DEBUG
    #add_definitions(/DVIENNA_DEBUG)
    add_definitions(/DVIENNA_WINDOWS)
    SET( CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS  "${CMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS}" )
endif()

#qt4_automoc(${project_SRCS})
#add_executable(firefly ${project_SRCS})
cuda_add_executable(firefly  ${RES_FILES} ${project_SRCS})

if(CMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME STREQUAL "Linux")
    set(LIBS ${LIBS} X11 Xxf86vm Xi GL glfw3 GLEW Xrandr pthread assimp BulletDynamics BulletCollision LinearMath fmodex64 freeimage gsl gslcblas ${CUDA_curand_LIBRARY})
	target_link_libraries(firefly ${LIBS})
else()
        set(LIBS ${LIBS} OpenGL32 glfw3 GLEW32 assimp fmodex64_vc FreeImage gsl cblas ${CUDA_curand_LIBRARY})
	target_link_libraries(firefly ${LIBS} debug BulletDynamics_Debug debug BulletCollision_Debug debug LinearMath_Debug)
	target_link_libraries(firefly ${LIBS} optimized BulletDynamics optimized BulletCollision optimized LinearMath)
	target_link_libraries(firefly ${LIBS} general BulletDynamics general BulletCollision general LinearMath)
endif()

And lastly you’ll need cross platform libraries. Fortunately there are quite good ones.

  • For GUI I use Qt, it can also open an OpenGL window, but if you don’t need GUI, it would be overkill.
  • So for Chawah and Firefly I used GLFW, which simply opens a window and provides mouse and keyboard input.
  • Then you need an OpenGL extension loader, I used GLEW, but there are also other alternatives.
  • For math (everything connected to vectors and matrices) I can recommend GLM.
  • Assimp loads meshes, objects, animations and whole scene graphs, but it’s a bit buggy in certain areas and lacks certain features (only linear animations afaik, only simple materials and only basic lights (no area lights)). I didn’t find anything better though.
  • Then there is FreeImage which is a very easy to use image loader and exporter.
  • You can also check out the other libs from the CMake file..

In case you want a working example, just download the firefly project. The project is quite big, I made a post about it. If you have any questions, then I’ll answer them in the comments..

How is GLM’s performance in CUDA?

Edit3:
Short answer: Slower than CUDA’s native types (float3, float4 etc). In the course of my real time graphics project I’ll extend and replace NVIDIA’s proprietary HelperMath header to include matrix multiplications and other helper functions I need. After the project is finished I’ll probably publish this library as open source (naturally not including any of NVIDIA’s code).

I’m working on a little ray tracing CUDA project right now and found out, that GLM also works in that environment. But soon I ran into performance issues and was looking for the culprit. While it certainly isn’t only GLM, it still slowed things down.

I decided to make some quick performance tests and here are the results:

  • GLM’s matrix multiplications are 4 times slower compared to my custom one liner and using CUDA’s native vector types.
  • Dot and cross products of vectors are roughly 30% faster than the implementation found in the cuda samples (helper_math.h)

I used a GForce GTX 550 Ti, CUDA 6.5 and GLM 0.9.5.4 on linux for the test.

Hopefully the people behind GLM can fix it quickly as it is really a neat library. I submitted a bug report.

In case you want to see or even edit the source code of the tests, it lies on bitbucket, feel free to commit any changes : )

Edit:
We were able to fix the performance problem in glm’s bug tracker. After aligning glm::vec4 properly, the matrix multiplication is almost equal and other functions (dot and cross) got even faster.
time for cuda glm (matrix): 233 milliseconds
time for cuda helper math (matrix): 226 milliseconds
time for cuda glm (dot): 185 milliseconds
time for cuda helper math (dot): 302 milliseconds
time for cuda glm (cross): 46 milliseconds
time for cuda helper math (cross): 162 milliseconds

Edit2:
The matrix multiplication indeed improved performance, but in the real world (well, my code :P ) this was only part of the issue. Additionally the tests I made triggered some kind of optimisation that was only possible in glm’s code. I discovered it when seeing that the results of those testing computations were either infinity or 0. I changed the values of the matrix/vectors so that the results stay in a range of [10*e-2, 1000] and vualĂ , the performance is almost the same.

Because of GLM running slower in my code, I conducted some additional tests and attempted to improve GLM’s performance. The performance didn’t improve enough, so I finally submitted another bug report.

Edit3:
The bug report was closed without any fixes to the lower performance. Additional aligned data types where added (aligned_vec4 etc), but the default ones won’t be aligned on CUDA.


## test results of my fastest glm version
#test 1 (synthetic)
time for cuda glm (matrix):.........546 milliseconds
time for cuda helper math (matrix):.660 milliseconds
time for cuda glm (dot):............471 milliseconds
time for cuda helper math (dot):....491 milliseconds
time for cuda glm (cross):..........246 milliseconds
time for cuda helper math (cross):..246 milliseconds

#test 2a (real life)
time for glm:.......................468 milliseconds
time for cuda:......................417 milliseconds

#test 2b (2a, but removed early exit from a loop)
time for glm:.......................373 milliseconds
time for cuda:......................370 milliseconds