Performance Roadmap

Major initiatives

Binary Attribute Support

Long-term goal: deck.gl layers can directly consume binary data. deck.gl's architecture is "binary first" (i.e. code paths are prioritized to ensure "zero overhead"/"minimal copying/iteration" in the binary case, and optimized "to the bone").

Docs:

• Binary Data - Explains considerations when working with binary data.

RFCs:

• Binary Data Support RFC - Basic binary array support with deck.gl.
• GLSL Accessor RFC - Proposal for
• Texture Attribute RFC - Enable variable-primitive layers read "descriptive attributes" from a single column value.
• Chunked Data Support - Proposal for enabling deck.gl to work directly with Chunked Columnar data.

Load data in workers/streaming loads

See loaders.gl

Build attributes in workers

See RFC

Use off-screen WebGL context

See luma.gl RFC

Partial Updates

See RFC

Improved prop diffing, uniform setting

TBA

Smaller improvements

Attributes/WebGL (memory use, buffer creation etc)

• Provide a target array for attribute updaters to write into, avoiding generation of millions of temporary objects during certain attribute generation.
• Support generic vertex attributes: Setting an accessor to a constant would cause a generic vertex attribute to be set, completely bypassing attribute generation (requires luma.gl fix).
• Create a shared instancePickingColors attribute (resized to a high water mark) that can be shared between all layers, instead of generating one for each layer (could give a 20-25% boost in attribute update time for many layers, in addition to obvious memory savings).
• Use single interleaved WebGL buffers with offsets and strides separating attributes (may only give <5% improvement on modern GPUs)
• Pack colors and picking colors as Uint8s instead of Float32s
• Allow apps to pre generate and pass in WebGL Buffers (not just typed arrays) as props.

GeoJsonLayer etc optimizations

• Eliminate high cost of geojson splitting for Paths and Polygons
  • Make PathLayer support multipaths, and empty paths
  • Make SolidPolygonLayer support multipolygons, and empty polygons
  • Make GeoJson pass through unmodified FeatureCollection to PathLayer and SolidPolygonLayer
• Improve Tesselation support to ensure custom geometries are built in most efficient way.

Layer lifecycle optimizations

• Separate changeFlag dirtying from layer updates
• Disable attribute updates for non-visible layers (requires previous)
• Disable CompositeLayer.renderLayers on shouldUpdate returns false (i.e. reuse layers from last render)
• Allow reuse of layers and optimize Layer matching accordingly (see #257)
• Layer matching - Use a map to match layer ids vs. repeated linear searches O(N) vs O(N2)

Picking

• Allow the app to control what type of picking a layer supports (e.g. hover vs. click vs. none) - as hovering over a very large layer can cause noticeable CPU activity, while clicks are much less frequent.
• Under WebGL2, use WebGLBuffer for readPixels to reduce GPU roundtrip costs.
• Mode that disables picking during pan and zoom operations?
• Document how to override default color based picking, for layers that can provide more efficient mathematical implementations (e.g. regular tilings like grid and hexagons layers).
• Allow multiple layers to render picking colors into the same framebuffer, so that we only need one (or at least fewer) expensive calls to gl.getPixels
• Reuse framebuffer between picking operations.

Effects

• Provide another appropriately resized framebuffer or texture as common scratch pad area, to avoid each effect allocating its own?
• Refactor life cycle management so that effects can also use it?

API optimizations

• Animation mode - allow some uniforms to be updated between WebGL frames without requiring passing new layers to deck.gl.
• Expose AttributeManager to apps - so that apps can precalculate attributes, and reuse buffers that are shared between layers.