v2.9.0
What's Changed
Feature: Texture Throttling 🚀🎨
Lightning 2.0 introduced the concept of "throttling" texture source creation (and inherently texture creation itself). This was designed to reduce strain on devices with limited pipelines for uploading data from the CPU to the GPU, as well as to limit the number of network requests per frame.
Prior to this feature, L3 would download texture sources and create GPU textures at the end of the rendering pipeline without any mechanism to control how many textures were created at once. In L3 2.8.0 and earlier, if you created 10k nodes, the system would attempt to spawn all 10k nodes in a single frame. While this might work smoothly on desktop Chrome devices with abundant resources, it quickly becomes a bottleneck on embedded devices with limited resources and much lower bus speeds/bandwidth.
Texture throttling introduces a queueing mechanism to regulate the number of texture sources being created/downloaded and textures being uploaded to the GPU. By default, this is set to 0, meaning the entire queue will be processed at once. This value can and should be configured per device or deployment by the consumer of the renderer for optimal performance. 🛠️🎛️
Related PRs:
- Introduce Texture Throttling by @wouterlucas in #472
- Refactor isRenderable detection by @wouterlucas in #479
- 🎨 Refactor CoreNode Renderability Logic 🚀 by @wouterlucas in #476
- fix: added missing check for shader existence by @pecoram in #480
- fix: prevent cleanup of SDF Font Face textures for now by @wouterlucas in #481
- Add render to texture spritemap visual test by @wouterlucas in #485
- fix: deprecate CoreNode.preventCleanup and re-introduce preload option by @wouterlucas in #486
Compatibility Changes 🔄🌐
Lightning 3 faced some shortcomings on Chrome v38 due to incomplete ImageData implementations in the browser, issues with Uint8ClampedArray, and differences in the createImageBitmap signature across Chrome versions v51/52/54. 🖥️🧩
The updates below resolve compatibility with Chrome v38 for color textures 🖌️🎨 and introduce a createImageBitmap fingerprinting mechanism to ensure the most optimal path is used. 🛠️⚡
- Fixes for Chrome v38 by @wouterlucas in #456
- Simplify ImageWorkerManager initialization by @wouterlucas in #460
- fix: compatibility with chrome 51 by @pecoram in #454
- Update README.md & BROWSERS.md by @wouterlucas in #461
- fix: Origin error when using Image() constructor by @wouterlucas in #469
- fix: safari 9 HTMLImageElement check by @pecoram in #473
Other changes
Fixes
- Correct clipping of children in render-to-texture nodes by @erikhaandrikman in #458
- fix: data attr in inspector not reactive.. by @chiefcll in #462
- fix: new Image texture on Canvas by @pecoram in #470
- fix: radialGradient cache key was using linearGradient by @chiefcll in #474
Features
- feat: Add support for Podman by @wouterlucas in #459
- feat: add optional external canvas for rendering by @wouterlucas in #471
Full Changelog: v2.8.0...v2.9.0
