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.
