#version 330 core

out vec4 finalColor;

uniform float drawWireframe;

uniform vec4 materialColor;

vec4 fancyLightingFunction(vec4 colorToProcess) {

// Fancy lighting function here...

}

void main() {

if (drawWireframe == 1.0) finalColor = materialColor;

// May I call "return" here?

finalColor = fancyLightingFunction(materialColor);

}

Simple question about GLSL and fragment shaders. May I return the "final color" early if I don't need to do any further processing in the void main function?

Yes you can but it will not save you from any precessing in fact. Strange but true. Once gpu arrives at fragment processing, it is just too pointless to omit few local computations at the data. Surprising?

I will add up, I think I was just too short. If you want to use a branch not for computational requirement, but for optimizing one, then it maybe might be possible that some optimization would result up if you branched by an uniform value. That might get rid of the branched routine call for entire draw call. But if you branch byt vertex atrribute value/texture fetch value/or any other draw data dependant volatile value, do not even do it unless it is for required computational issue .

Dynamic branching with modern gpu's aren't that slow anymore. In fact its common optimization to skip large blocks of code.

• Wireframe
• Skybox (using a texture2D sampler)
• Standard shading (with different texture channels for ambient, diffuse, specular, emissive, etc.)
  • Within my standard shading model I plan to have the capability to calculate multiple lights and be able to position them, etc.
  • I would also have the capability to turn lighting "on" or "off" such that I can just show the ambient/diffuse textures without lighting calculations.

As I understand, you may use "if(something < 0.1) discard;"

There is no point to bundle all those shaders that do totally different things to single shader. Swapping shader for thing like sky box is no brainer. You draw sky box one time per frame and sky box can cover millions of pixels.

From what I read you should avoid changing shaders if you can.

As a rule of thumb you should avoid unnecessarily changing render states or bound resources, yes... But you should also avoid unnecessary 'if' statements within shaders!

You're making every pixel much more expensive in order to save a little bit of CPU time.