Currently, Bevy rebuilds the buffer containing all the transforms for
joints every frame, during the extraction phase. This is inefficient in
cases in which many skins are present in the scene and their joints
don't move, such as the Caldera test scene.
To address this problem, this commit switches skin extraction to use a
set of retained GPU buffers with allocations managed by the offset
allocator. I use fine-grained change detection in order to determine
which skins need updating. Note that the granularity is on the level of
an entire skin, not individual joints. Using the change detection at
that level would yield poor performance in common cases in which an
entire skin is animated at once. Also, this patch yields additional
performance from the fact that changing joint transforms no longer
requires the skinned mesh to be re-extracted.
Note that this optimization can be a double-edged sword. In
`many_foxes`, fine-grained change detection regressed the performance of
`extract_skins` by 3.4x. This is because every joint is updated every
frame in that example, so change detection is pointless and is pure
overhead. Because the `many_foxes` workload is actually representative
of animated scenes, this patch includes a heuristic that disables
fine-grained change detection if the number of transformed entities in
the frame exceeds a certain fraction of the total number of joints.
Currently, this threshold is set to 25%. Note that this is a crude
heuristic, because it doesn't distinguish between the number of
transformed *joints* and the number of transformed *entities*; however,
it should be good enough to yield the optimum code path most of the
time.
Finally, this patch fixes a bug whereby skinned meshes are actually
being incorrectly retained if the buffer offsets of the joints of those
skinned meshes changes from frame to frame. To fix this without
retaining skins, we would have to re-extract every skinned mesh every
frame. Doing this was a significant regression on Caldera. With this PR,
by contrast, mesh joints stay at the same buffer offset, so we don't
have to update the `MeshInputUniform` containing the buffer offset every
frame. This also makes PR #17717 easier to implement, because that PR
uses the buffer offset from the previous frame, and the logic for
calculating that is simplified if the previous frame's buffer offset is
guaranteed to be identical to that of the current frame.
On Caldera, this patch reduces the time spent in `extract_skins` from
1.79 ms to near zero. On `many_foxes`, this patch regresses the
performance of `extract_skins` by approximately 10%-25%, depending on
the number of foxes. This has only a small impact on frame rate.
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