Godot FastNoiseSIMD

This module wraps the FastNoiseSIMD library for use with Godot Engine 3.2+.

It automatically detects the highest SIMD level available at runtime. It does not require SIMD to build or run, so your games can run on a variety of systems.

Many noise libraries provide singular lookups (e.g. get_nosie_3d(x, y, z). I have provided these singular functions, but they are approximately 3x slower than the same function in the original FastNoise library. The speed gains come from requesting a large block of noise all at once (e.g. 16x16x16 or 2048x2048).

Features

These noise algorithms are provided:

Value Noise 3D
Perlin Noise 3D
Cubic Noise 3D
White Noise 3D
Cellular Noise 3D
Simplex Noise 3D (Enabled by default, see thirdparty/FastNoiseSIMD.h to disable or learn about patent issue.)

Plus these features:

Multiple fractal options for all of the above
Perturb input coordinates in 3D space
Integrated up-sampling
Easy to use 3D cave noise (Cellular: Div2Cave)

Supported Compilers & Hardware

While FastNoiseSIMD does not require a processor that supports SIMD to run or build, it does require a modern compiler that supports SIMD instructions.

FastNosieSIMD has been tested on these compilers:

MSVC v120/v140, 2013-2019
Intel 16.0
GCC 4.7, 8.3, 9.2 Linux
Clang MacOSX

Mingw-64/gcc is not supported due to 1 2 3 4, etc. So cross compiling from Linux to Windows using this compiler is not an option. That's why this module has not been included in the main Godot repository.

However you should be able to build it without issue on your own system or you can use my prebuilt Godot binaries.

These SIMD instruction sets are supported.

SSE2
SSE4.1
AVX2 - FMA3
AVX-512F
ARM NEON

FastNoiseSIMD will automatically use the highest SIMD level it detects at runtime, including no SIMD level. You can set it to a lower level.

How To Install

Preparation

This module requires PR #35144 for Godot 4, which has not yet been merged, or a backport to Godot 3.2 which hasn't been written yet.

Until those have been merged into the main repository, use these instructions:

Use my whole FastNoise branch: 3.2 branch, 4.0 branch

or install the files manually:

Delete godot/modules/opensimplex, godot/thirdparty/misc/open-simplex-noise*
Drop these files into godot/modules/noise: 3.2 modules, 4.0 modules
Drop these files into godot/thirdparty/noise: 3.2 thirdparty, 4.0 thirdparty

Setup this module

Go to the modules folder in your Godot source: cd ~/godot/modules
Clone this repository: git clone https://github.com/tinmanjuggernaut/godot_fastnoise_simd.git
Rename the folder to fastnoise_simd: mv godot_fastnoise_simd fastnoise_simd
If you are building for Godot 3.2, change to that branch: cd fastnoise_simd; git checkout 3.2
Rebuild Godot.
Now when creating a new Noise object, such as within a texture, you should see FastNoiseSIMD along with FastNoise and OpenSimplexNoise. You can also view the online help and search FastNoiseSIMD.

Benchmarks

Here you can see some benchmarks from FastNoiseSIMD compared to regular FastNoise and OpenSimplexNoise in Godot. These numbers are the time needed to generate a 2D image in ms. FastNoise Perlin Fractal is comparable to OpenSimplexNoise.

	1k	2k	4k
OpenSimplexNoise	107	435	1730
FN Perlin Fractal	104	400	1600
SIMD Perlin Fractal (singular)	304	1210	4800
SIMD Perlin Fractal	28	107	430
---	---	---	---
FN Value	74	294
SIMD Value	13	44
---	---	---	---
FN heavily tweaked Cellular		2284
SIMD heavily tweaked Cellular		229

This library provides singular lookup functions (e.g. get_noise_3d(x,y,z)), but they are 3x slower than regular FastNoise. Speed gains come from requesting large blocks at once, especially when Z is a multiple of 8.

Generating basic 2D textures with FastNoiseSIMD is 4-6x faster than FastNoise, and becomes even faster as the algorithms gets more complex, even into 3D. Generating large blocks of noise can be split up into multiple threads becoming another 3-7x faster or (up to 40x faster than FastNoise)! See pyFastNoiseSIMD for multithreaded benchmarks.

What happens if you run this on a system that doesn't support SIMD?

All new Intel 64-bit processors have SSE2 built in, so I can't turn it off for my system, but I have compared regular FastNoise with FastNoiseSIMD SSE2 and AVX2. I'd guess retrieving FastNoiseSIMD sets without using SIMD is on par with regular FastNoise. Or it may be better because the algorithm is working in one set, rather than being called for every individual pixel/voxel.

Here I generated a 1k image using the library author's demo app:

	FN	SIMD SSE2	SIMD AVX2
Value	66	23	6
Perlin Fractal	108	94	43
Cellular Noise Lookup to Simplex	96	117	61
Cellular Distance2 Sub	209	75	30

TokisanGames / godot_fastnoise_simd