Awesome

Introduction

This is an effort to implement Hello Triangle using the Mantle API by using the API reference and reverse engineering public Mantle demos.

See this blog post for more information:

https://medium.com/@Overv/implementing-hello-triangle-in-mantle-4302450fbcd2

Approach

The reference is used as primary resource, because it contains a full API reference and some sample code. Unfortunately it misses a lot of the constant definitions, like GR_API_VERSION, but these can be determined by creating a proxy mantle64.dll that logs calls and the contents of structs. This approach is currently used on the Star Swarm Stress Test to figure out what calls and data are needed to render a triangle on the screen. Other values, like GR_MAX_HEAPS can be figured out by querying for the struct size with functions like grGetObjectInfo.

The intermediate language used for Mantle shaders is a subset of AMD IL, for which CodeXL contains a compiler. The disassembly it outputs is incorrect, but the bytecode itself is valid. Mantle appears to accept this code without problems.

Status

The code is capable of creating a window using the SDL library, clearing it to black and rendering a per-vertex colored triangle using Mantle.

The vertex shader reads the position (float4) and color (float4) from a buffer using the SV_VertexID built-in variable. Each buffer is assigned a memory view into GPU memory filled with the following data:

float vertices[] = {
    // Positions
    0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 1.0,
    0.5, -0.5, 0.0, 1.0,
    -0.5, -0.5, 0.0, 1.0,

    // Colors
    1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0,
    0.0, 1.0, 0.0, 1.0,
    0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0
};

Shader compilation

Shaders are written in HLSL and compiled to AMD Intermediate Language using the CodeXLAnalyzer.exe tool included in CodeXL using the --il flag. A batch script for doing this is included in the shaders folder. The hex code on the right side can then be converted to a binary file using the output2binary.py script, which takes the IL output file name as parameter. The binaries can then be loaded into Mantle using grCreateShader, as is demonstrated in the code.

License

Copyright (c) 2015 Alexander Overvoorde

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to
deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the
rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or
sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
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FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS
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