Improved Shader Variants Management
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Summary
Shader variant compilation is a form of static branching which provides authoring and runtime control of conditional shader features, as well as runtime performance, by compiling individual shader variants per branch.
This comes at the cost of build time, file size and runtime memory usage.
Shader variants are mostly introduced using preprocessor directives that evaluate Variant Keywords. As keyword usage grows, so does the build and runtime overhead of shader variants.
Workflows and tools exist to log shader compilation, profile runtime memory usage, and perform build time stripping of variants based on keywords. However, these workflows are time consuming and complex.
We wish to improve Shader Variant Management as a whole, from tracking of shader variants - to keyword filtering and variant stripping.
Intended Behaviour / Usecase
- Introduce tools to analyse the project's generated shader variants (and their associated keywords) , providing insights such as:
- Which shaders/keywords generate the most variants?
- Which variants are loaded or missing at runtime?
- Provide additional control and improved workflows for shader variant generation and stripping.