A point is drawn by generating a set of fragments in the shape of a square
centered around the vertex of the point.
Each vertex has an associated point size that controls the width/height of
that square.
The point size is taken from the (potentially clipped) shader built-in
PointSize
written by:
and clamped to the implementation-dependent point size range
[pointSizeRange
[0],pointSizeRange
[1]].
If the value written to PointSize
is less than or equal to zero, or if
no value was written to PointSize
, results are undefined.
Not all point sizes need be supported, but the size 1.0 must be supported.
The range of supported sizes and the size of evenly-spaced gradations within
that range are implementation-dependent.
The range and gradations are obtained from the pointSizeRange
and
pointSizeGranularity
members of VkPhysicalDeviceLimits
.
If, for instance, the size range is from 0.1 to 2.0 and the gradation size
is 0.1, then the size 0.1, 0.2, …, 1.9, 2.0 are supported.
Additional point sizes may also be supported.
There is no requirement that these sizes be equally spaced.
If an unsupported size is requested, the nearest supported size is used
instead.
Point rasterization produces a fragment for each framebuffer pixel with one or more sample points that intersect a region centered at the point’s (xf,yf). This region is a square with side equal to the current point size. Coverage bits that correspond to sample points that intersect the region are 1, other coverage bits are 0.
All fragments produced in rasterizing a point are assigned the same
associated data, which are those of the vertex corresponding to the point.
However, the fragment shader built-in PointCoord
contains point sprite
texture coordinates.
The s and t point sprite texture coordinates vary from zero to
one across the point horizontally left-to-right and top-to-bottom,
respectively.
The following formulas are used to evaluate s and t:
where size is the point’s size, (xp,yp) is the location at which
the point sprite coordinates are evaluated - this may be the framebuffer
coordinates of the pixel center (i.e. at the half-integer) or the location
of a sample, and (xf,yf) is the exact, unrounded framebuffer
coordinate of the vertex for the point.
When rasterizationSamples
is VK_SAMPLE_COUNT_1_BIT
, the pixel
center must be used.