Testing shaders

OpenGL
1

When writing shaders, I often find that what works on one card does not work on another. Specifically, since I’m using nvidia everywhere, users with ATI usually end up suffering.

The obvious budget-dependent solution to that is to buy a machine just to put an ATI card in. However, the errors are usually syntax errors of various kinds; once those are fixed, it tends to run well enough. So, I’m wondering:

  • Since I don’t actually need to run them (I should, but I don’t have to), it should be possible for ATI to create a standalone program that just test-compiles shaders. I can’t find anything like that. Do you know?

  • Lacking that, is there a service somewhere that would let me test-compile shaders on a variety of hardware?

  • Lacking that, would someone be interested in helping me make one? I can do the programming, if you have a server with an ATI card sitting around to deal with that half of the equation.

2

AMD do just that - they provide a great tool called GPUShaderAnalyser which does a great job of compiling your shaders and shows you various compilation results for different h/w. It’s a free down load from their site.

3

Oh, well.

I did find that one, but I should probably mention - it needs to work in Linux. I don’t have a Windows license anywhere.

4

Sort of thread crashing, but does NVidia have a tool like ShaderAnalyzer?

5

nvidia has cg compiler. You can use it to compile GLSL code to see if everything is ok. This is the same compiler they use in the driver.

6

Right. Try these command lines:


cgc -oglsl -strict -glslWerror -nocode -profile gpu_vp vert.glsl
cgc -oglsl -strict -glslWerror -nocode -profile gpu_fp frag.glsl
7

Thanks! That’s really useful. (I didn’t know the cg compiler could do glsl too).

8

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