Module webrender::segment

Primitive segmentation

Overview

Segmenting is the process of breaking rectangular primitives into smaller rectangular primitives in order to extract parts that could benefit from a fast paths.

Typically this is used to allow fully opaque segments to be rendered in the opaque pass. For example when an opaque rectangle has a non-axis-aligned transform applied, we usually have to apply some anti-aliasing around the edges which requires alpha blending. By segmenting the edges out of the center of the primitive, we can keep a large amount of pixels in the opaque pass. Segmenting also lets us avoids rasterizing parts of clip masks that we know to have no effect or to be fully masking. For example by segmenting the corners of a rounded rectangle clip, we can optimize both rendering the mask and the primitive by only rasterize the corners in the mask and not applying any clipping to the segments of the primitive that don’t overlap the borders.

It is a flexible system in the sense that different sources of segmentation (for example two rounded rectangle clips) can affect the segmentation, and the possibility to segment some effects such as specific clip kinds does not necessarily mean the primitive will actually be segmented.

Segments and clipping

Segments of a primitive can be either not clipped, fully clipped, or partially clipped. In the first two case we don’t need a clip mask. For each partially masked segments, a mask is rasterized using a render task. All of the interesting steps happen during frame building.

• The first step is to determine the segmentation and write the associated GPU data. See PrimitiveInstance::build_segments_if_needed and write_brush_segment_description in prim_store/mod.rs which uses the segment builder of this module.
• The second step is to generate the mask render tasks. See BrushSegment::update_clip_task and RenderTask::new_mask. For each segment that needs a mask, the contribution of all clips that affect the segment is added to the mask’s render task.
• Segments are assigned to batches (See batch.rs). Segments of a given primitive can be assigned to different batches.

See also the clip module documentation for details about how clipping information is represented.

Structs

• EdgeAaSegmentMask
  Each bit of the edge AA mask is: 0, when the edge of the primitive needs to be considered for AA 1, when the edge of the segment needs to be considered for AA
• Event 🔒
• Item 🔒
• ItemFlags
• ItemIndex 🔒
• Segment
• SegmentBuilder

Enums

• EventKind 🔒

Constants

• MAX_SEGMENTS 🔒

Functions

• clamp 🔒
• emit_segment_if_needed 🔒