Uniform buffered array elements are incorrect

Question

I've been writing something using GL3.3 which takes a uniform buffer, and uses the information from it to select sprite tiles in a frag shader. It's working on my desktop, with a Nvidia GTX780, but my AMD based laptop (A6-4455M) has some issues with it. Both are on the latest (or very recent) drivers.

Back to the code, It first of all sets up a uniform buffer, which consists of two uints, and a uint array. They then get filled, and are accessed in the shader. At first I got a GL error on the laptop because I was not allocating enough, but a temporary change taking padding into account has sorted that out, and now data is actually being buffered.

The first two uints are no problem. I've also got the array somewhat readable in the shader, there is just one problem; The data is multiplied by four! At the moment the array is just some test data, initialized to its index, so spriteArr[1] == 1, spriteArr[34] == 34, etc. However, Accessing it in the shader, spriteArr[10] gives 40. This goes all the way up to spriteArr[143] == 572. Beyond this and it's something else. I don't know exactly why this is, but it would appear to be an incorrect offset.

I am using the shared uniform layout, and getting the uniform offsets from GL itself, so they should be correct. I did notice that the offsets on the AMD card are much larger, as if it is adding more padding. They are always 0,4,8 on the desktop, but 0,16,32 on the laptop.

If it makes any difference, there is another UBO (binding point 0), which is used for the view and projection matrices. These work as intended. However it is not used in the fragment shader. It is also created before this UBO.

UBO initialisation code:

GLuint spriteUBO;
glGenBuffers(1, &spriteUBO);
glBindBuffer(GL_UNIFORM_BUFFER, spriteUBO);
unsigned maxsize = (2 + 576 + 24) * sizeof(GLuint);
/*Bad I know, but temporary. AMD's driver adds 24 bytes of padding. Nvidias has none.
 Not the cause of this problem. At least ensures we have enough allocated. */

glBufferData(GL_UNIFORM_BUFFER, maxsize, NULL, GL_STATIC_DRAW);
glBindBuffer(GL_UNIFORM_BUFFER, 0);
//Set binding point
GLuint spriteUBOIndex = glGetUniformBlockIndex(programID, "SpriteMatchData");
glUniformBlockBinding(programID, spriteUBOIndex, 1);


static const GLchar *unames[] = 
{
    "width", "height", 
    //"size", 
    "spriteArr"
};

GLuint uindices[3];
GLint offsets[3];
glGetUniformIndices(programID,3,unames,uindices);
glGetActiveUniformsiv(programID, 3, uindices, GL_UNIFORM_OFFSET, offsets);

//buffer stuff
glBindBufferBase(GL_UNIFORM_BUFFER, 1, spriteUBO);
glBufferSubData(GL_UNIFORM_BUFFER,offsets[0], sizeof(GLuint), tm.getWidth());
glBufferSubData(GL_UNIFORM_BUFFER, offsets[1], sizeof(GLuint), tm.getHeight());
glBufferSubData(GL_UNIFORM_BUFFER, offsets[2], tm.getTileCount() * sizeof(GLuint), tm.getSpriteArray());

Fragment Shader:

layout (shared) uniform SpriteMatchData{
uint width, height;
uint spriteArr[576];};

Then later on I experiment with the array with something like this:

if(spriteArr[10] == uint(40))
{
debug_colour = vec4(0.0,1.0,0.0,0.0);//green
}
else
{
debug_colour = vec4(1.0,0.0,0.0,0.0); //red
}

With debug_colour turning green in this instance.

Is there any way to sort this out with something that works with both systems? Why is the AMD driver handling this so differently? Could it be a bug in the way it deals with uniform uint arrays?

Nicol Bolas Nicol Bolas · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-20T15:06:41

Why is the AMD driver handling this so differently?

Because that's what you asked for:

layout (shared) uniform SpriteMatchData

You explicitly asked for shared layout. That layout is implementation defined. Therefore, two different implementations are allowed to give you two different layouts. As such, if you want to use SpriteMatchData in a platform-independent way, you must query its layout from the program after linking it.

While you did query the offsets for the values, you did not query the array stride: the byte offset from element to element within the array. There is nothing in the specification that requires that shared layouts tightly pack arrays.

Really though, there's pretty much no reason not to use std140 layout. You can avoid all of this querying of offsets and simply design C++ structs that can be directly consumed by GLSL.

Uniform buffered array elements are incorrect

1 Answers