Designing a Portable Shader Library for Current and Future APIs

1. Designing a Portable Shader Library for Current and Future API's David Gosselin 3D Application Research Group

2. Outline Introduction & Motivation Demos Case Study: ATI’s demo shader format Design Goals Artist’s Interface Texture Definitions Vertex and Index Buffers Sub-shaders and Passes Vertex and Pixel Shaders Converting from D3D ASM to HLSL Example

3. Motivation Share the lessons learned from our shader library Shaders in general Moving from D3D ASM to HLSL Show some advantages to being shader-centric Show ways to include fallback paths Show cross platform generalizations Would like to see more games use shaders and not just target the least common denominator for graphics

4. Why Shaders? Direction of the Industry Hardware very shader driven Will continue down this path Modern engines need to be shader aware High level shader languages (HLSL and OpenGL) make shaders easier to write Visual flexibility Less engine churn

5. What is a Shader Library? Library in the sense of a linkable .lib file or collection of source code Not a collection of shaders Abstracts Graphics API Render States Constant Binding Shader Binding Etc. Manages Shaders Integrates with preprocessing/export

6. Engine Block Diagram