What are the advantages of GLSL's compilation model?

Posted by Kos on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Kos
Published on 2012-06-09T10:02:25Z Indexed on 2012/06/09 10:47 UTC
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opengl

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gpu

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shaders

GLSL is fundamentally different from other shader solutions because the server (GPU driver) is responsible for shader compilation. Cg and HLSL are (afaik) generally compiled a priori and sent to the GPU in that way.

This causes some real-world practical issues:

many drivers provide buggy compilers
compilers differ in terms of strictness (one GPU can accept a program while another won't)
also we can't know how the assembler code will be optimised

What are the upsides of GLSL's current approach? Is it worth it?

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