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Features |Screenshots |Introduction |Installation |Building |Changelog

A lightweight editor for GLSL and HLSL shaders and a fully-featured IDE for developing GPU based algorithms.

• OpenGL and Vulkan renderer.
• Decent source editor with automatic indentation, brace highlighting, rectangular selection…
• GLSL, HLSL and JavaScript syntax highlighting with basic auto completion.
• Possibility to evaluate shader programs with completely customizeable input and render state.
• Continuous validation of standalone shader and script files.
• Automatically defined printf function for printf-debugging.
• JavaScript expressions and scripts to define uniform input.
• Dumping of preprocessed source, SPIR-V and glslang AST.
• Reading and writing of image files (KTX and DDS for 3D/Array textures, block compressed textures, cube maps…).
• Streaming video files to textures (only when built with the optional dependencyQt6Multimedia).
• Editor for structured binary files.
• Advanced hot reloading of externally modified files.
• Base16 theme support.
• Sample sessions in the Help menu.

To get started, you can open and play around with the sample sessions in theHelp menu.

In order to try out the shaders, the session allows to define draw and compute calls, together with the pipeline state and data the programs should operate on.

It can be populated with items from theSession menu or the context menu. Undo/redo, copy/paste and drag/drop should work as expected (also between multiple instances).It is even possible to drag the items to and from a text editor (they are serialized as JSON).

The sample sessions can also be used as templates - saving a session As... copies all the dependencies to the new location.

The session can be evaluated manually[F6], automatically whenever something relevant changes[F7] or steadily[F8], for animations.All items which contributed to the last evaluation are highlighted.

The items of a session pretty much correspond the concepts known from writing OpenGL applications:

• Call -Most prominently are the draw and the compute calls. Whenever the session is evaluated, all active calls are evaluated in consecutive order. They can be de-/activated using the checkbox.The elapsed time of each call is output to theMessage window (measured using GPU timer queries).

• Program -Consists of one or multiple shaders, which are linked together, so they can be used by draw or compute calls.

• Texture -All kind of color, depth or stencil textures can be created. They serve as sample sources, image in- and outputs and target attachments. They can be backed by files.

• Target -Specifies where draws calls should render to. Multiple images can be attached. Depending on the attached image's type, different render states can be configured.

• Binding -Allows to bind data to a program's uniforms, samplers, images and buffers. A binding affects all subsequent calls, until it is replaced by a binding with the same name, or the scope ends (seeGroups). The name of a binding needs to match the name of a program's binding points.

• Buffer -Buffer blocks define the structure of a region within a binary. They consist of rows with multiple fields of some data type. Buffers can be backed by binary files.

• Stream -Serves as the input for vertex shaders. A stream consists of multiple attributes, which get their data from the referenced buffer blocks.

• Group -Allows to structure more complex sessions. They open a new scope unlessinline scope is checked. Items within a scope are not visible for items outside the scope (they do not appear in the combo boxes).

• Script -Allows to define JavaScript functions and variables in script files, which can subsequently be used in uniform binding expressions.Scripts can also be used to dynamically populate the session and generate buffer and texture data.There is one JavaScript state for the whole session and the scripts are evaluated in consecutive order (Group scopes do not have an effect).

An up to date build can be installed from theAUR.

A portable build can be downloaded from thelatest release page.

A C++20 conforming compiler is required. A script for theCMake build system is provided.It depends on the following libraries, which can be installed using a package manager likevcpkg or by other means:

• Qt6
• KDGpu (automatically pulled as submodule)
• glslang
• spirv-cross
• libktx
• vulkan-memory-allocator
• spdlog
• OpenImageIO (optional)

# install dependenciessudo apt install build-essential git cmake qtdeclarative6-dev libdrm-dev pkg-config libxcb*-dev libx11-dev libxrandr-dev# check out sourcegit clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/houmain/gpupadcd gpupad# install vcpkggit clone --depth=1 https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg.gitvcpkg/bootstrap-vcpkg.sh# install additional dependencies using vcpkgvcpkg/vcpkg install vulkan"ktx[vulkan]" glslang spirv-cross vulkan-memory-allocator spdlog# buildcmake -B build -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmakecmake --build build -j8

# install Qt6# https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/get-and-install-qt.html# check out sourcegit clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/houmain/gpupadcd gpupad# install vcpkggit clone --depth=1 https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg.gitvcpkg\bootstrap-vcpkg# install dependencies using vcpkgvcpkg\vcpkg install vulkan"ktx[vulkan]" glslang spirv-cross vulkan-memory-allocator spdlog# buildcmake -B build -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=C:\Qt\6.7.2\msvc2022_64 -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=vcpkg\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmakecmake --build build -j8

GPUpad is released under the GNU GPLv3. Please seeLICENSE for license details.