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 $(x_f,y_f)$ . 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,
$(x_p,y_p)$
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
$(x_f,y_f)$
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.