Glsl tagged news

Ultra Engine 0.9.6 introduces a new foliage system using GLSL compute shaders for efficient rendering of dense forests. The engine makes extensive use of Khronos’ glTF file format and PBR rendering reference code. Ultra Engine leverages Khronos technologies to provide up to 10x faster framerates for games and VR applications. Find out about other features included in the latest Ultra Engine release.

Greg Fischer, Senior Engineer at LunarG, released a new white paper describing functionality in spriv-tools and glslang which allows the user to do dead code elimination in SPIR-V shaders across stages. This functionality also can be used to trim trailing dead components from aggregate input and output variables in the shaders. Many drivers do these cross-stage optimizations automatically under the covers, but some drivers may not. These optimizations can have a significant impact on a shader’s performance and size.

In this white paper, LunarG demonstrates how to debug GLSL/HLSL shaders using a recent Vulkan feature, Debug PrintF.

​Godot Engine has started up their Vulkan Progress Reports after 3 month hiatus. GamingOnLinux touts Godot Engine as making more impressive progress towards Vulkan API support. Godot 4.0 will see many improvements including: using a special screen-space filter to correctly simulate roughness; GLSL shaders (not Godot shaders, real GLSL 4.50+Vulkan extensions) can now be imported and will be automatically imported and converted to SPIR-V when found; allowing you to have low level access to the rendering APIs. Check out the report to learn more.

​Google acquired and open-sourced GraphicsFuzz a little over a year ago. GraphicsFuzz is no longer about only OpenGL, OpenGL ES and GLSL shaders but also operates on SPIR-V shaders for consumption by Vulkan drivers. There are also GLSL/SPIR-V shader reducers in addition to the fuzzer that relies upon randomized metamorphic testing.

There are several great Khronos related meetings for April 2019: "OpenXR 0.90 Provisional Specification Review" on April 10th in Cambridge MA USA, "Munich Meetup April 2019" on April 12th in Munich Germany with Dr Chajdas and friends covering Vulkan, SPIR-V and GLSL, and starting on April 16th is a three part meet up on "A Gentle Introduction to Shaders 1" in London UK. Learn more about these meet ups and how Khronos can help support your Khronos related meet up.

Radeon GPU Analyzer (RGA) is thte AMD offline compiler and integrated code analysis tool, supporting the high-level shading and kernel languages that are consumed by DirectX 11, Vulkan, OpenGL and OpenCL, including HLSL, GLSL, the OpenCL kernel language, and SPIR-V. Along with support for Vulkan in the RGA GUI, the biggest new feature in RGA 2.1 is a new analysis system that lets you obtain the GCN machine ISA and hardware resource information, using the compiler in the running driver that you have in your system. Learn more on the Radeon GPU Blog from AMD.

Shader Conductor is one of several open-source projects for going from one shading language to another. With Microsoft's Shader Conductor the focus is on converting HLSL to GLSL or SPIR-V (OpenGL/Vulkan), ESSL (OpenGL ES), MSL (Apple Metal), and older HLSL shader models. Shader Conductor can handle all shader stages, including geometry and compute shaders. Learn more about this new Open Source project from Microsoft.

Khronos has released a provisional Vulkan Memory Model Specification that includes extensions for Vulkan, SPIR-V, and GLSL and gives Vulkan developers additional control over how their shaders synchronize access to should cooperate safely over memory operations in a parallel execution environment. In tandem with the extension specification, Khronos has released memory model extension conformance tests to enable implementers to do early tests on their shader compilers to ensure that the specified memory synchronization is implemented correctly. The memory model will have an Alloy description of the extension functionality to enable formal modeling and experimentation.

The GSN Composer is an online node-based visual programming environment that allows generating custom nodes using GLSL/WebGL. For every uniform variable that is created within the GLSL shader code editor, an input slot is automatically added to the corresponding shader node, which can be connected to other nodes of the dataflow graph. This makes online shader prototyping very fast and intuitive and frees the developer of writing many lines of support code to fill the GLSL uniform variables with values. The GSN Composer requires no login and is free-of-charge. All that is needed to get started is a web-browser and your creativity. Several simple GLSL examples are provided such that this tool is also suited as starting point for GLSL/WebGL beginners.

Many applications porting to Vulkan also need a way to port their HLSL shaders to SPIR-V. Glslang provides a method to translate HLSL shaders to SPIR-V, which is now available and ready to use. Currently the HLSL mode of the glslang frontend is complete enough to run complex, real-world workloads such as Dota 2 and Ashes of the Singularity. It accepts shaders for any shader stage, and handles common language constructs for functions, control flow, variable and type declarations, registers and pack offsets, most DX10 and later texture methods, most intrinsic functions, most preprocessor functionality, most built-in semantics, and attributes that affect stage functionality. To learn more about the HLSL to SPIR-V translator, visit this FAQ at the glslang GitHub.

The latest PowerVR SDK v3.4 includes several exciting new features, including the addition of the latest compilers for PowerVR Series6 (FP16 and FP32) and Series6XT GPUs to PVRShaderEditor, providing more up-to-date shader profiling. PVRShaderEditor also adds new functionality to access the GLSL disassembly for these compilers as well as full instruction set documentation for PowerVR Rogue GPUs. A new WebGL SDK has been included in the package.

The new version of Internet Explorer IE11 improves WebGL performance and adds support for instancing extension, 16-bit textures, GLSL builtin variables, and triangle fans. Microsoft notes its Khronos WebGL Conformance Test score has improved from 93 percent to 97 percent.

A new tool for uploading 3D content with WebGL and scripting GLSL shaders online has been released. Currently models are uploaded directly from Blender. Everyone is welcome to upload their own art work.

NME 3.5.5 has been released with WebGL support. NME is a framework for building games and applications for mobile, desktop and web platforms. OpenGLView was introduced in NME 3.5, and support for HTML5, using WebGL has now been added. The new “HerokuShaders” sample is a great cross-platform illustration of GLSL shaders at work. The sample will run on Windows, Mac, Linux, BlackBerry and HTML5, and will run on other mobile platforms once GLES2 support is official.