2D/3D updateRanges for textures

[WilliamVenner]

Description

I have a dynamic sprite sheet that updates often. Uploading the entire thing to the GPU on update is not optimal, and creating an updateRange for each row of pixels that was updated seems hacky and inefficient.

Solution

It would be awesome if textures had 2D/3D updateRanges, too.

add2DUpdateRange add3DUpdateRange methods for example, that allow you to specify width, height, depth.

Alternatives

1D updateRanges, which is inefficient.

Additional context

No response

[Mugen87]

and creating an updateRange for each row of pixels

When I understand #30998 correctly, the texture data that you want to update does not have to be organized in rows. The update range can be an arbitrary block of memory.

Can you please demonstrate with a live example how the current API does not support your use case? Use one of the fiddles from the issue template as a start.

[gkjohnson]

The update range can be an arbitrary block of memory.

From the docs the "updateRange" function only allows you to specify data in the form of a start and stride. Looking at the code from #30998 it looks like it's assuming the span of data in the range is required to be on the same row (it only merges two spans if they're on the same row) but I otherwise don't see those restrictions in place anywhere else:

.addUpdateRange( start : number, count : number )

I think it should be possible to allow for specifying a 2d region of data to upload (or 3d region for 3d targets) to update too for cases where you don't want to upload rows individually. One of the optimizations that's performed by the renderer is to merge any overlapping spans to cut down on gpu commands and uploaded data but as far as I understand that's less straight forward to do with 2d or 3d regions.

cc @CodyJasonBennett @agargaro