I'm working on a UE4 project. By default UE4 compile its shader to spirv binary by hlslcc + glslang, but in this way the generated spirv shader is suboptimal so I want to use shaderconductor(DXC) to compile hlsl directly to spirv (just like what UE5 does: Unreal Engine 5.0 Release Notes | Unreal Engine 5.0 Documentation)
After I use DXC, the project works pretty well on adreno devices, but it will crash on mali deviecs. I have tried these devices, the all failed to create pipeline (both compute ppl and graphics ppl) with VK_ERROR_INITIALIZATION_FAILED:
The khr spec states that create pipeline should only return the following errors:
and also adreno devices works well, so I guess this might be mali driver bugs.
I have no clue what's goes wrong with generated spirv binary and it seems I can't get enough error information from vulkan, so I need to ask help from mali experts.
I can send you the apk that can produce the failure so if you are interested please leave me a email address. Thanks in advance!
I just notice there is Compilers and Libraries forum, maybe I should post the question there.
I can move the question there for you. Should be done in a few moments :)
Oli
Arm Community team
Thanks Oliver! But then I notice this "compiler forum" is more related to compile for CPU programs, not for graphics shaders, so original forum is better place for my question. Can you help to move it back? Thanks a lot!
No problem, back in the original forum.
Thanks! Hope the GPU compiler team can see this question soon. lol
Which Mali devices / driver version did you try on?Can you share the impacted SPIR-V shaders and PSO state (or an APK we can pull it from) with our developer relations team at developer@arm.com?
Kind regards, Pete
Hi Peter, thanks for your reply. I sent the apk and my mali devices/driver version to developer@arm.com
Thanks for the shader!
It appears the problem is with the SPV_GOOGLE_user_type extension, which we do not support, being used. Based on the DXC documentation they will add this if -fspv-reflect is passed -- which UE will pass by default. However, UE5 will also later strip out the use of the extension before passing the shader to the Vulkan driver. If you look in `Engine/Source/Developer/VulkanShaderFormat/Private/VulkanShaderCompiler.cpp` in UE5 you can find the code that does this (look for `bStripReflect`).
So, I think your best bet here might be to backport the stripping from UE5 to UE4 if you want to try to use DXC in UE4. Hope that helps :)
Thanks christian! Yes I'm aware the UE5 has extra pass to strip these extension and debug symbols, but I thought it's only used for mali offline compiler because the variable bStripReflect is defined by SupportsOfflineCompiler. Also I thought the "online" compiler in the driver can silently skip this unsupported extension because I saw the extension spec says "This has no semantic impact": SPIRV-Registry/SPV_GOOGLE_user_type.asciidoc at main · KhronosGroup/SPIRV-Registry (github.com) So it turns out I might be wrong. I can try add similiar pass in UE4 and check if it can fix the problem. I will reach you once I have some progress. Thanks for your important insights again!
Just confirmed that after strip SPV_GOOGLE_user_type in the spirv binary, everything works well. Thanks Peter & Christian again!