I've read this: https://community.arm.com/developer/tools-software/graphics/f/discussions/7975/programs-pipelines-performances-questions/30022#30022
Daniele di Donato said: "For example, it will remove a varying calculation in the vertex shader if the fragment shader doesn't declare to use it."
I'd like to know whether the device driver will remove the computation of some varyings which eventually don't contribute to the output of fragment shader, even it's declared in the varying struct ?
Because it's typical to write a uber shader with several features, and toggle each them on and off by preprocessor symbol. But this can become very messy and difficult to maintain. If we can safely rely upon the device driver to optimise them out, it will make the shader development easier. For example, can we safely remove remove #ifdef FEATURE_1/#endif from our code and rely exclusive the device driver to optimise the code out ?
In a real situation, there will be a lot of #ifdef FEATURE_X and they can even be nested.
struct Varying { #ifdef FEATURE_1 float2 uv2: TEXCOORD1; #endif }; half4 frag(Varying input) { ... #ifdef FEATURE_1 color += uv2; #endif ... return color; }
Hi, Peter, my last question is actually about the varyings, not the attributes.
For varyings that's all controlled by the driver, and will repack as needed for the current pipeline based on what's actually used. The application gets no direct control over it in either case.
HTH, Pete