Point cloud performance

[Guest]

I'm seeing major performance issues in a QML app I wrote to show a point cloud in a Scene3d. With 1000 points/sec it's alright, but at 10,000 it basically just halts my entire computer. The goal is to get up into the millions of points (which is what are old app, a Qt/VTK mixture could do before slowing down.)

I'm worried that I'm not offloading processing into another thread, or not rendering properly. ... This is my first Qt project and am new to all of this.

Basically I build a circular_buffer of points (each point is about 24 bytes), which I copy into a QByteArray on a custom QGeometry, on an Entity. This entity has a material that runs a vertex and fragment shader.

Is there something I can do to increase the performance?

material:

import Qt3D.Core 2.0
import Qt3D.Render 2.0

Material {
	effect: Effect {
		techniques: Technique {
			renderPasses: RenderPass {
				shaderProgram: ShaderProgram {
					vertexShaderCode: loadSource("qrc:/shaders/pointcloud.vert")
					fragmentShaderCode: loadSource("qrc:/shaders/pointcloud.frag")
				}
				renderStates: [
					PointSize { sizeMode: PointSize.Programmable } //supported since OpenGL 3.2
				]
			}
			graphicsApiFilter {
				api: GraphicsApiFilter.OpenGL
				profile: GraphicsApiFilter.CoreProfile
				majorVersion: 4
				minorVersion: 3
			}
		}
	}
        // some parameters...
}

My shaders are pretty simple:

vertex:

#version 430

layout(location = 1) in vec3 vertexPosition;

out VertexBlock
{
	flat vec3 col;
	vec3 pos;
	vec3 normal;
} v_out;

uniform mat4 modelView;
uniform mat3 modelViewNormal;
uniform mat4 mvp;
uniform mat4 projectionMatrix;
uniform mat4 viewportMatrix;

uniform float pointSize;
uniform float maxDistance;

void main()
{
	vec3 vertexNormal = vec3(1.0, 1.0, 1.0);
	v_out.normal = normalize(modelViewNormal * vertexNormal);
	v_out.pos    = vec3(modelView * vec4(vertexPosition, 1.0));

	float c      = (vertexPosition[0]*vertexPosition[0] + vertexPosition[1]*vertexPosition[1])*maxDistance;
	v_out.col    = vec3(c,c,0.5);

	gl_Position = mvp * vec4(vertexPosition, 1.0);
	gl_PointSize = viewportMatrix[1][1] * projectionMatrix[1][1] * pointSize / gl_Position.w;
}

fragment:

#version 430

in VertexBlock
{
	flat vec3 col;
	vec3 pos;
	vec3 normal;
} frag_in;

out vec4 colour;

void main()
{
	colour = vec4(frag_in.col, 1.0);
}

Renderer:

import Qt3D.Core 2.0
import Qt3D.Render 2.0

import "Cameras"

RenderSettings {
	id: root

	property CameraSet cameraSet: CameraSet {
		id: cameraSet
	}

	property real userViewWidth: 0.79
	property real topOrthoViewHeight: 0.79

	activeFrameGraph: Viewport {
		id: viewport
		normalizedRect: Qt.rect(0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0)

		RenderSurfaceSelector {
			ClearBuffers {
				buffers : ClearBuffers.ColorDepthBuffer
				clearColor: theme.cSceneClear

				NoDraw {}
			}

			Viewport {
				id: userViewport
				normalizedRect: Qt.rect(0, 0, userViewWidth, 1.0)

				CameraSelector {
					id: userCameraSelectorViewport
					camera: cameraSet.user.camera
				}
			}
			// Two other viewports...
		}
	}
}

Thanks

[Moved to QML and Qt Quick ~kshegunov]