Geometry Nodes: new geometry nodes evaluator

The old geometry nodes evaluator was quite basic and missed many features.
It was useful to get the geometry nodes project started. However, nowadays
we run into its limitations from time to time.

The new evaluator is more complex, but comes with new capabilities.
The two most important capabilities are that it can now execute nodes in
parallel and it supports lazy evaluation.

The performance improvement by multi-threading depends a lot on the specific
node tree. In our demo files, the speedup is measurable but not huge. This
is mainly because they are bottlenecked by one or two nodes that have to be
executed one after the other (often the Boolean or Attribute Proximity nodes)
or because the bottleneck is multi-threaded already (often openvdb nodes).

Lazy evaluation of inputs is only supported by the Switch node for now.
Previously, geometry nodes would always compute both inputs and then just
discard the one that is not used. Now, only the input that is required
is computed.

For some more details read D11191, T87620 and the in-code documentation.

Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D11191

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/source/blender/blenkernel/BKE_node.h b/source/blender/blenkernel/BKE_node.h
index fbe7e91e985..8824ffc5695 100644
--- a/source/blender/blenkernel/BKE_node.h
+++ b/source/blender/blenkernel/BKE_node.h
@@ -325,6 +325,7 @@ typedef struct bNodeType {
 
   /* Execute a geometry node. */
   NodeGeometryExecFunction geometry_node_execute;
+  bool geometry_node_execute_supports_lazyness;
 
   /* RNA integration */
   ExtensionRNA rna_ext;