You're reading from Become a Unity Shaders Guru

Product type Book

Published in Jul 2023

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781837636747

Pages 492 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Languages

Concepts

Game Optimization

Author (1):

Mina Pêcheux

Table of Contents (23) Chapters

Preface

1. Part 1: Creating Shaders in Unity

2. Chapter 1: Re-Coding a Basic Blinn-Phong Shader with Unity/CG

3. Part 2: Stepping Up to URP and the Shader Graph

4. Chapter 2: The Three Unity Render Pipelines

5. Chapter 3: Writing Your First URP Shader

6. Chapter 4: Transforming Your Shader into a Lit PBS Shader

7. Chapter 5: Discovering the Shader Graph with a Toon Shader

8. Part 3: Advanced Game Shaders

9. Chapter 6: Simulating Geometry Efficiently

10. Chapter 7: Exploring the Unity Compute Shaders and Procedural Drawing

11. Chapter 8: The Power of Ray Marching

12. Part 4: Optimizing Your Unity Shaders

13. Chapter 9: Shader Compilation, Branching, and Variants

14. Chapter 10: Optimizing Your Code, or Making Your Own Pipeline?

15. Part 5: The Toolbox

16. Chapter 11: A Little Suite of 2D Shaders

17. Chapter 12: Vertex Displacement Shaders

18. Chapter 13: Wireframes and Geometry Shaders

19. Chapter 14: Screen Effect Shaders

20. Index

Why subscribe?

21. Other Books You May Enjoy

Appendix: Some Quick Refreshers on Shaders in Unity

Generating a grid of randomized cubes

Alright – we now know what compute shaders and compute buffers are. To truly understand how they can be used in a real-life scenario, however, let’s discuss a basic example where compute shaders can greatly improve performance: the generation of a grid of randomly positioned and colored cubes.

We will first see how this simple process can be performed with a naive approach that runs on the CPU to get familiar with the problem, and then explore the limitations of this implementation. Finally, we will transfer our logic over to the GPU by using a compute shader and see how it boosts our performance.

Writing a naive C# implementation

Before diving into GPU offloading and performance enhancement, it stands to reason that we must first establish a baseline – or, in other words, a reference to compare our “improved” version against. So, first, let’s create a simple implementation of our random color...