A Shader Language Off-line Cross-Compiler on the Desktops

Abstract

In our modern computer graphics systems, they use GPUs (graphics processing units) to execute the low-level parallel instructions, compiled from the shader language source codes. Recently, some graphics system specifications, including OpenGL SC 2.0, introduce the off-line compilation. With this new scheme, the independent off-line compiler will generate the final binary executable codes. Typically, the target system will execute the pre-compiled binary executable codes, at some time later. In this paper, we analyzed the detailed requirements on the shader language off-line compilation. Based on these analysis, we designed the whole compiling process and the binary file format for the off-line compiler. As the verification process of our design, we implemented the prototype off-line compiler for our existing OpenGL SC 2.0 implementation on the target embedded system. We executed a set of pre-compiled binary files on the target system, and all the results are the same to the desktop executions. We finally showed that the shader language off-line compilers are possible with our proposed schemes.