GLSL to become the main rendering path in OCCT

In the past, graphic card in computer was designed to perform limited set of operations. At some point, all cards had to provide the hardware-accelerated functionality called Transformation and Lighting (T&L). Application developers had to implement all features and visual effects that were not parts of the fixed set of graphic card functionality on CPU.

Later on, graphic cards made dramatic step in design - they became programmable, being able to perform custom (initially very small and simple) programs. This change started new era of Graphics Processing Units - GPU. Thus nowadays any modern computer (and even mobile device) has CPU (general-purpose computations) and GPU (processor dedicated for graphics acceleration).

This transition has been reflected in graphic libraries, including OpenGL. The new approach has been named Programmable Pipeline while conventional approach is named Fixed-Function Pipeline or FFP (Transformation & Lighting providing limited functionality).

As GPUs had become fast enough, applications started using Programmable Pipeline for implementing real-time effects that were not possible before. Games moved to the new pipeline very fast, since it allowed programming visually appealing image. In CAD software, this trend was less visible for a very simple reason - conventional Fixed-Function pipeline covered most features used by this software.

Evolution of GLSL in OCCT

Open CASCADE Technology started migration to Programmable Pipeline (GLSL programs) in '2013 (#0024192) and shader support was first introduced in 6.7.0 release. Several objectives were considered, including:

• Performance. Programmable Pipeline should show performance comparable to Fixed-Function Pipeline.
• Flexibility. OCCT should provide interface to application developers to implement custom GLSL programs.
• Feature completeness. Programmable Pipeline should transparently replace majority of visualization features already available in OCCT.
• New features. Introduce new features not available using Fixed-Function Pipeline.
• Compatibility. OCCT should keep Fixed-Function Pipeline for some time.

Flexibility. In fact, the first release supported only custom (application-provided) GLSL programs with sample shaders in OCCT. Only in further releases built-in GLSL programs were introduced as straight-forward replacement for Fixed-Function Pipeline.

Feature completeness is the main challenge on this way, because OCCT implements a lot of features using Fixed Function Pipeline. Some of them are quite obscure and rarely used, but still it is important to reach parity of available functionality between Programmable and Fixed-Function Pipelines in OCCT.

Open CASCADE Technology 6.8.0 introduced built-in GLSL programs covering main rendering paths, compatible with OpenGL ES 2.0+ used on mobile platforms. As a result, Programmable Pipeline became a replacement for Fixed-Function Pipeline (unavailable in OpenGL ES 2.0+) and this change was fully transparent for applications, i.e. it did not require any changes in application code. At this point, Programmable Pipeline was used mostly for compatibility with Android and iOS devices.

Compatibility, or keeping Fixed-Function Pipeline in parallel with Programmable Pipeline, increases code complexity and implies some performance penalty. However, OCCT is not a graphics game (which has relatively short, limited development cycle, and then just abandoned) - it is framework used by numerous applications; removing Fixed-Function Pipeline without implementing functional equivalent in Programmable Pipeline would be absolutely unacceptable for the users. Mixing the two approaches allows supporting new features via GLSL while keeping old features via compatible code paths.

New features. GLSL programs allowed implementing features and new algorithms, not possible (or not as flexible and efficient) in Fixed-Function Pipeline. Examples of such features:

• Phong shading (per-pixel lighting improving visual quality on rough triangulation).
• Stereoscopic output, including support of row-interlaced displays and anaglyph glasses (since OCCT 6.9.1).
• Ray-Tracing built-in into OCCT. Ray-tracing is a powerful rendering approach for achieving photo-realistic visual quality. It is worth mentioning that Ray-Tracing can be easily enabled in standard OCCT viewer. Moreover, OCCT supports mixture of conventional (rasterization-based) approach and ray-tracing in the same view, which is rarely available in other Ray-Tracing rendering engines (usually designed for rendering static image or video).
• More features to come in the future.

Deprecation of Fixed-Function Pipeline in OCCT

Open CASCADE Technology 7.0.0 is a major release increasing functional coverage of Programmable Pipeline to the level acceptable for most applications. This release actually deprecates usage of Fixed-Function Pipeline in OCCT (as specified in Release Notes), although it is still used by default. Applications might disable Fixed-Function pipeline by setting flag OpenGl_Caps::ffpEnable of OpenGl_GraphicDriver::ChangeOptions() before creating the viewer.

There are several reasons why Fixed-Function Pipeline has been deprecated in OCCT:

• This functionality was deprecated in OpenGL since version 3.1 that introduced notion of Core (without deprecated functionality) and Compatible Profiles.
• Many new features are not available within Compatible Profile on some systems - OS X supports OpenGL 3+ only with disabled Fixed-Function Pipeline; OpenGL ES 2.0+ on mobile devices does not support it either; Mesa OpenGL driver on Linux supports OpenGL 3.1+ only without deprecated functionality.
• GPU vendors tend to abandon further support of Fixed-Function Pipeline in OpenGL drivers. This means that known bugs in this functionality will be never fixed (and new bugs appear), performance will not be improved.
• Moreover, mixture of Fixed and Programmable Pipelines reveals new driver bugs.

Therefore, OCCT evolution is aimed to remove Fixed-Function rendering code, and deprecation is a first step.

Current state and further steps

Fixed-Function Pipeline has already been disabled by default in the current development branch (master), and the next OCCT release will include this change. OCCT still keeps old functionality, however new visualization features will not be propagated to Fixed-Function Pipeline and new bugs related to Fixed-Function Pipeline will be processed with low priority.

 

At some point, deprecated functionality will be completely removed from OCCT code base to improve maintainability.