Image textures were being packed into a single buffer for OpenCL, which
limited the amount of memory available for images to the size of one
buffer (usually 4gb on AMD hardware). By packing textures into multiple
buffers that limit is removed, while simultaneously reducing the number
of buffers that need to be passed to each kernel.
Benchmarks were within 2%.
Fixes T51554.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2745
Technically not passing all buffers used by a kernel is undefined
behavior. We haven't had any issues with this so far on AMD or
Nvidia, but it's known to be a problem with Intel and we received
a report from AMD that this is a problem on newer hardware, so we
need to make this change at some point.
Unfortunately there a cost to being correct, about 5% for the
benchmark scenes. For low sample counts it's even worse, I've
seen up to 50% slowdown. For the latter case I think adjusting
tile updating logic can help, but not sure what that would look
like yet (it would be just a few lines change however).
