fix: a density grid is bounded in cells, not by the window's pixels

A grid was the axes rect in device pixels, so dragging a window wide made the
image wider with it -- and the per-frame pass over it is O(cells): the fade
multiplies every cell, a host's ink()/peak() read every cell, and a frame the
fade moved converts and uploads every cell as one byte. At 2x device scale a
1520x850 window's axes rect is 2877 device pixels wide, so four rows of one
trace are 4.5 M cells and 4.9 MB uploaded a frame; measured headless on
llvmpipe with a 2 s window, 12.9 ms of tick and 12.8 ms of draw a frame, every
frame under a time fade -- a cost that follows the window and has no ceiling.

The grid is now the axes rect up to kDensityCellCap (2^18 cells, a mebibyte of
counts), scaled down uniformly past it so cells stay square and the picture
keeps the axes' aspect, and magnified back over the rect with a linear filter:
a cell is a count, so a fragment between two of them is between their two ink
levels, which a point sample cannot give once a cell is several pixels wide.
The same four rows at the cap are 1.05 M cells, 3.9 ms of tick and 5.6 ms of
draw and 1.0 MB uploaded, while a grid under the cap is untouched -- a 640x360
viewport's 573x313 axes is still 179 349 cells, one a device pixel.

The image's footprint is the axes rect rounded up to whole device pixels on
both sides of the pipe, so a grid under the cap keeps the exact
one-texel-a-pixel mapping it has always had (sx/sy come out exactly 1) and only
a capped grid reads its cell index through a scale. Moving the decay itself to
the GPU was considered and left out: the CPU grid is what ink()/peak() read,
what the deposit adds to and what the per-sweep dedupe keys on, so a GPU image
would have to be reconciled with it per frame -- a larger change than this
bound, and not one to half-do.

Tests: a_density_grid_is_capped_whatever_the_window reads the bound off a
3840x2160 viewport (261 504 cells of a 3784x2138 axes, aspect kept),
a_capped_density_is_magnified_over_the_axes_rect reads the screen side of it
(569x460 cells covering all 832 of the rect's columns), and the density cases
now assert their capped figures. 399 cases, 0 failed.
This commit is contained in:
Martino Ferrari committed 2026-10-16 21:09:07 +02:00
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@@ -104,10 +104,11 @@ class DensityProgram {
/// `u_viewport`: render target size in pixels.
void set_viewport(Vec2 px) const noexcept;
/// `u_origin` and `u_size`: the quad in `Rect` pixels -- the axes rect's top-left corner and
/// the grid's own size, which is the axes rect in whole device pixels. They are two uniforms
/// rather than a rect because a `vec4` uniform would need a fourth setter shape for one
/// caller; a corner and a size are what the vertex shader builds the quad from anyway.
/// `u_origin` and `u_size`: the quad in `Rect` pixels -- the axes rect's top-left corner and its
/// size, which is the area the image is drawn over (its own grid may hold fewer cells than the
/// rect has pixels: see `kDensityCellCap`). They are two uniforms rather than a rect because a
/// `vec4` uniform would need a fourth setter shape for one caller; a corner and a size are what
/// the vertex shader builds the quad from anyway.
void set_rect(Vec2 origin, Vec2 size) const noexcept;
/// `u_color`: the tint the cells' luminances are multiplied into.
void set_color(Color color) const noexcept;