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  • Ian Romanick's avatar
    nir: Rematerialize compare instructions · 3ee2e84c
    Ian Romanick authored
    
    
    On some architectures, Boolean values used to control conditional
    branches or condtional selection must be propagated into a flag.  This
    generally means that a stored Boolean value must be compared with zero.
    Rather than force the generation of extra compares with zero, re-emit
    the original comparison instruction.  This can save register pressure by
    not needing to store the Boolean value.
    
    There are several possible ares for future improvement to this pass:
    
    1. Be more conservative.  If both sources to the comparison instruction
    are non-constants, it may be better for register pressure to emit the
    extra compare.  The current shader-db results on Intel GPUs (next
    commit) lead me to believe that this is not currently a problem.
    
    2. Be less conservative.  Currently the pass requires that all users of
    the comparison match the pattern.  The idea is that after the pass is
    complete, no instruction will use the resulting Boolean value.  The only
    uses will be of the flag value.  It may be beneficial to relax this
    requirement in some cases.
    
    3. Be less conservative.  Also try to rematerialize comparisons used for
    discard_if intrinsics.  After changing the way the Intel compiler
    generates cod e for discard_if (see MR!935), I tried implementing this
    already.  The changes were pretty small.  Instructions were helped in 19
    shaders, but, overall, cycles were hurt.  A commit "nir: Rematerialize
    comparisons for nir_intrinsic_discard_if too" is on my fd.o cgit.
    
    4. Copy the preceeding ALU instruction.  If the comparison is a
    comparison with zero, and it is the only user of a particular ALU
    instruction (e.g., (a+b) != 0.0), it may be a further improvment to also
    copy the preceeding ALU instruction.  On Intel GPUs, this may enable
    cmod propagation to make additional progress.
    
    v2: Use much simpler method to get the prev_block for an if-statement.
    Suggested by Tim.
    
    Reviewed-by: default avatarMatt Turner <mattst88@gmail.com>
    3ee2e84c