OpenGL Uniform Buffer std140 layout, a driver bug?

OpenGL OpenGL: Advanced Coding
1

The OpenGL specification lies (or is this a bug?)… Referring to the layout for std140, with shared uniform buffers, it states:

"The set of rules shown in Tabl e L-1 are used by the GLSL compiler to layout members in a std140-qualified uniform block. The offsets of members in the block are accumulated based on the sizes of the previous members in the block (those declared before the variable in question), and the starting offset. The starting offset of the first member is always zero.

Scalar variable type (bool, int, uint, float) - Size of the scalar in basic machine types"

http://www.opengl-redbook.com/appendices/AppL.pdf

So, armed with this information, I setup a uniform block in my shader that looks something like this:

// Spotlight.

layout (std140) uniform Spotlight
{
float Light_Intensity;
vec4 Light_Ambient;
vec3 Light_Position;
};

… only to discover it doesn’t work with the subsequent std140 layout I setup on the CPU side. That is the first 4 bytes are a float (size of the machine scalar type for GLfloat), the next 16 bytes are a vec4 and the following 12 bytes are a vec3 (with 4 bytes left over on the end to take account of the rule that a vec3 is really a vec4).

When I change the CPU side to specify a float as being the same size as a vec4, i.e. 16 bytes, and do my offsets and buffer size making this assumption, the shader works as intended.

So, either the spec is wrong or I’ve misunderstood the meaning of “scalar” in this context or ATI have a driver bug. Can anyone shed any light on this mystery?

2

The table is misleading, by “offset” they mean alignment.

floats are 4-byte aligned
vec2/bvec2/ivec2 are 8-byte aligned

vec3/vec4 are 16-byte aligned

so, your C++ struct must be:


struct Spotlight{
    float a;
    float padding1[3];

    vec4 b;
    vec3 c;
    float padding2[1];
};
3

Ok, thanks for the info.