GPUpad

Features | Screenshots | Introduction | Installation | Building | Changelog

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

Features

• 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 (only when glslangValidator is found).
• 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 dependency Qt6Multimedia).
• Editor for structured binary files.
• Advanced hot reloading of externally modified files.
• Base16 theme support.
• Sample sessions in the Help menu.

Screenshots

 

Introduction

Getting Started

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

Session

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 the Session 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.

Evaluation

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.

Items

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 the Message 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 (see Groups). 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 unless inline 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).

Installation

Arch Linux and derivatives

An up to date build can be installed from the AUR.

Windows and other Linux distributions

A portable build can be downloaded from the latest release page.

Building

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

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

Building on Debian Linux and derivatives:

# install dependencies
sudo apt install build-essential git cmake qtdeclarative6-dev libdrm-dev pkg-config libxcb*-dev libx11-dev libxrandr-dev

# check out source
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/houmain/gpupad
cd gpupad

# install vcpkg
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg.git
vcpkg/bootstrap-vcpkg.sh

# install additional dependencies using vcpkg
vcpkg/vcpkg install vulkan "ktx[vulkan]" glslang spirv-cross vulkan-memory-allocator spdlog

# build
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake
cmake --build build -j8

Building on Windows:

# install Qt6
# https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/get-and-install-qt.html

# check out source
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/houmain/gpupad
cd gpupad

# install vcpkg
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg.git
vcpkg\bootstrap-vcpkg

# install dependencies using vcpkg
vcpkg\vcpkg install vulkan "ktx[vulkan]" glslang spirv-cross vulkan-memory-allocator spdlog

# build
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=C:\Qt\6.7.2\msvc2022_64 -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=vcpkg\scripts\buildsystems\vcpkg.cmake
cmake --build build -j8

License

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