Skip to content

Comment on Simulating a Planet on the GPU: Part 1 (2022)parent

Comments

I found them fun once they work, but if something did not work, debugging them I did not enjoy so much.

Nothing like outputting specific colors to see what branch the current pixel is currently running through. It's like printf debugging but colorful and with only three floats of output.

Well in the GL/Vulkan world there's finally functionality now in recent years for printf output from shaders, which finally fixes the issue. I'd assume DirectX probably also has something similar but I don't work with it so I don't know.

Hm .. I just have limited experience with WebGPU so far, but since that is still highly unstable and I really would like a printf functionality and all of the performance possible, I guess I should rather invest all my learning efforts towards Vulkan. Thanks for the hint.

I agree it’s very difficult to debug them. I sometimes rewrite my shaders in Vex and debug them in that. It’s a shader language that runs on the CPU in Houdini. You can output a value at each pixel which is useful for values outside the range of 0 to 1 or you can use printf(). I’m still looking for something that will transpile shaders into JavaScript.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.