Mixed Precision GPU Noise with HLSL

I posted an article a while back, entitled Very Fast, High-Precision SIMD/GPU Gradient Noise, where I outlined a technique for achieving double-resolution noise at speeds close to that when using float arithmetic. The key observation was that floor could be used on cell boundaries to mask off the ranges that require double arithmetic, allowing the bulk of the work to use float arithmetic.

The GPU code was initially written in OpenCL and then ported to CUDA using ComputeBridge. Neither were good platforms for releasing a game; releasing them on both at the same time was a recipe for madness so I ported everything to HLSL. Unfortunately HLSL SM5 doesn't support floor(double).

So I sat down and took some time to cook up a software version. The first task was to isolate the fraction:

double MaskOutFraction(double v)
{
    // Alias double as 2 32-bit integers
    uint d0, d1;
    asuint(v, d0, d1);

    // 0  ... 51   mantissa     0  ... 19
    // 52 ... 62   exponent     20 ... 30
    // 63 ... 63   sign

    // Already a fraction?
    int exponent = ((d1 >> 20) & 0x7FF) - 1023;
    if (exponent < 0)
        return 0;

    // Calculate how many bits to shift to remove the fraction
    // As there is no check here for mask_bits <= 0, if the input double is large enough
    // such that it can't have any fractional representation, thie function will return
    // an incorrect result.
    // As this is the GPU, I've decided against that branch.
    int mask_bits = max(52 - exponent, 0);

    // Calculate low 31-bits of the inverted mantissa mask
    uint lo_shift_bits = min(mask_bits, 31);
    uint lo_mask = (1 << lo_shift_bits) - 1;

    // Can't do (1<<32)-1 with 32-bit integer so OR in the final bit if need be
    lo_mask |= mask_bits > 31 ? 0x80000000 : 0;

    // Calculate high 20 bits of the inverted mantissa mask
    uint hi_shift_bits = max(mask_bits - 32, 0);
    uint hi_mask = (1 << hi_shift_bits) - 1;

    // Mask out the fractional bits and recombine as a double
    d0 &= ~lo_mask;
    d1 &= ~hi_mask;
    v = asdouble(d0, d1);

    return v;
}

With that you can then subtract the fraction and provide necessary overloads:

// HLSL(SM5) doesn't support floor(double) so implement it in software
double Floor(double v)
{
    double r = MaskOutFraction(v);
    return v - r < 0 ? r - 1 : r;
}
double2 Floor(double2 v)
{
    v.x = Floor(v.x);
    v.y = Floor(v.y);
    return v;
}
double3 Floor(double3 v)
{
    v.x = Floor(v.x);
    v.y = Floor(v.y);
    v.z = Floor(v.z);
    return v;
}
double4 Floor(double4 v)
{
    v.x = Floor(v.x);
    v.y = Floor(v.y);
    v.z = Floor(v.z);
    v.w = Floor(v.w);
    return v;
}

Performance is admirably close to the CUDA/OpenCL versions (on nVidia/AMD hardware, respectively) and the same mask function can be reused for Round or Ceil functions.

noise, gpu