zdxc X Hyperion
Glide, 2,688 shader assets, DXIL and SPIR-V
HyperionEngine compiles
its shaders through IDxcCompiler3: a -P preprocess call, then the compile
with -HV 2021 -O3. The game is
Glide.
Swapping DXC's library for zdxc's is the only change.
Cook the game's shaders, end to end2.5× faster
DXC149 shaders/s
zdxc378 shaders/s
Compile throughput per worker13.9× faster
DXC36 shaders/s
zdxc504 shaders/s
Every compile, one after another14.2× faster
DXC51 shaders/s
zdxc719 shaders/s
All 17,544 calls on 24 threads5.9× faster
DXC665 calls/s
zdxc3,899 calls/s
Before and after
The same frame of Glide, with its shaders compiled by DXC and by zdxc.
Results
| DXC | zdxc | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Cook, wall time | 58.9 s | 23.2 s | 2.5× |
| Compile call, median | 12.6 ms | 1.0 ms | 12.7× |
| Compile call, 99th percentile | 131 ms | 15 ms | 8.8× |
| Slowest compile | 3.1 s | 72 ms | 43× |
| DXIL output | 76.4 MB | 61.5 MB |
- All shaders built with both DXC and zdxc.
- Valid output. 8,758 of the 8,770 objects pass DXC's validator. The other 12, ray-tracing libraries, differ only in a part whose layout depends on the validator version.
- Same picture. Glide renders the same frame with either compiler.
- macOS, SPIR-V. On an Apple M5, the Vulkan cook takes 10–11 s with
zdxc against 30–32 s with DXC, and every SPIR-V module passes
spirv-val.
How it was measured
The engine's BlobStorageCookCommandlet cooks Glide from an empty shader
cache, three times with each compiler, interleaved. A shim library in front
of the real one times every Compile call and records it; the recording is
then replayed through each compiler in one process, on one thread and on 24.