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As they have already told you, shaders being in binary or text form is orthogonal to making a tool like ShaderToy. However, binary form is way more compact for

As they have already told you, shaders being in binary or text form is orthogonal to making a tool like ShaderToy. However, binary form is way more compact for transmission, storage and performance. Almost nobody will use the text form except developers.

mantap 7y ago
The transmission/storage size of shaders isn't important. Textures and 3D models dominate in any non trivial project. Kind of like dieting by trimming your toenails.
- jacobolus 7y ago
  That’s maybe true for current 3D graphics heavy projects, but is not necessarily true for any arbitrary future use of GPU compute.
  - mantap 7y ago
    GPUs are machines for crunching data, be it graphics or NNs. I can't think of many use case where that isn't true. Also if you anticipate the GPU being used as an accelerator, that is all the more reason to use a text based format because it allows for easy code generation.
    - jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
      You are wrong. Many projects use GPUs without big datasets. See ShaderToy, for instance: a lot of computation, almost no input data. Many other games, too: they may use the GPU for rendering fast yet have say 50 MiB of textures and assets only. If you think of AAA games, ML and whatnot, of course. But I doubt anybody will use WebGPU for those, to be honest.
      - mantap 7y ago
        50MB of textures is a lot compared to shader source code size, which will be in the kilobytes for such a small project. The same with shadertoy, the storage or transmission of a shadertoy shader is never going to be significant compared to all the assets on the page. The contention was that a binary representation is necessary to save space for storage or transmission. It just isn't.
throwaway34241 7y ago
> However, binary form is way more compact That’s what I might expect too, so I was surprised to find out that SPIR-V is usually substantially larger than text based shaders. It also doesn’t seem to compress optimally using standard algorithms. [1] [1] https://aras-p.info/blog/2016/09/13/Shader-Compression-Some-Data/ https://aras-p.info/blog/2016/09/13/Shader-Compression-Some-...

mantap 7y ago

The transmission/storage size of shaders isn't important. Textures and 3D models dominate in any non trivial project. Kind of like dieting by trimming your toenails.

jacobolus 7y ago
That’s maybe true for current 3D graphics heavy projects, but is not necessarily true for any arbitrary future use of GPU compute.
- mantap 7y ago
  GPUs are machines for crunching data, be it graphics or NNs. I can't think of many use case where that isn't true. Also if you anticipate the GPU being used as an accelerator, that is all the more reason to use a text based format because it allows for easy code generation.
  - jfkebwjsbx 7y ago
    You are wrong. Many projects use GPUs without big datasets. See ShaderToy, for instance: a lot of computation, almost no input data. Many other games, too: they may use the GPU for rendering fast yet have say 50 MiB of textures and assets only. If you think of AAA games, ML and whatnot, of course. But I doubt anybody will use WebGPU for those, to be honest.
    - mantap 7y ago
      50MB of textures is a lot compared to shader source code size, which will be in the kilobytes for such a small project. The same with shadertoy, the storage or transmission of a shadertoy shader is never going to be significant compared to all the assets on the page. The contention was that a binary representation is necessary to save space for storage or transmission. It just isn't.

throwaway34241 7y ago

> However, binary form is way more compact That’s what I might expect too, so I was surprised to find out that SPIR-V is usually substantially larger than text based shaders. It also doesn’t seem to compress optimally using standard algorithms. [1] [1] https://aras-p.info/blog/2016/09/13/Shader-Compression-Some-Data/ https://aras-p.info/blog/2016/09/13/Shader-Compression-Some-...