GraphicsFence for Metal?

Is there any chance GraphicsFence will be supported on Metal in the 2020 release cycle? AFAICT it's basically impossible to use Compute Shaders together with Rendering on Metal because there's no way to wait for them to finish (and no way to even query if they have finished for that matter). The automatic resource locking doesn't seem to work either, presumably for the same reason.

 

GraphicsFence is just for async compute (i.e. a rendering CommandBuffer run via ExecuteCommandBufferAsync and friends) - if you use ComputeShader.Dispatch/DispatchIndirect or CommandBuffer.DispatchCompute on a non-async CommandBuffer, it won't be useful to you.

Ordering of non-async compute dispatches is guaranteed, and if that's not the case it sounds like there might be a bug in Unity. They'll probably want a project that can reproduce the issue, if so.

 

I was in fact trying to use it with ExecuteCommandBufferAsync, but admittedly that was only out of desperation after trying everything else I could think of to force it to complete before the buffer was used for rendering.

 

How are you determining that it's not completing before rendering?

 

I'm doing skinning calculations and if I calculate the buffer in the Compute Shader it has random "flickering" from frame to frame as only partial results have been computed. If I run the same code on the CPU and then SetData() on the buffer it's fine.

 

User Error - thanks for sanity checking me @slime73 turned out to be a packing issue with my compute buffer data.

The GraphicsFence functionality would still be nice for other purposes.