Creating and destroying textures is a slow process, particularly when we can
re-use them throughout most of the render chain. We now keep them stored so
they can be re-used which improves performance substantially.
Workers run in different threads and the backends can poll whether the worker
is currently busy or not. However the previous iteration has the worker (and an
atomic int) provide the busy state which could easily desync with the main
thread (since all workers run in different threads). By holding the busy states
in the main thread, the main thread will always be able to poll the busy state
accurately.
Updating values rapidly would cause strange jitters as a
byproduct of the viewer trying to update from the renderer while
it was still working. Rather than the viewer trying to access the
the renderer, we now send textures in the initial update signal
to keep everything synchronized.
Major refactoring work to try sharing as much code as possible between the
video renderers and audio renderers, as well as make them as
platform-independent as possible.
commit
For testing the new iteration, the texture cache disk download was written
into the main thread instead of into the separate threads. Now they're back
in separate threads again.
Also I think some of these files probably should have been in the previous
commit.
Once again, conceptually this system should work, however it does not seem to
be the most efficient and it wouldn't surprise me if the multithreading was
eventually upgraded to an even more coherent system one day. However for
"core principles" this should be fairly decent.
The previous iteration was fairly OpenGL-heavy. It's now been separated into
a base class that is OpenGL independent and a derived class that is
OpenGL-based. Over time this should allow for portability away from OpenGL
if necessary.
Previous iteration used probably an excessive amount of threads to make
everything work. New iteration intends to use precisely the amount of logical
threads available and using a moved QObject rather than a subclassed QThread
itsmattkc