Hi there,

I am looking for resources specifically related to managing multiple shaders and shader buffers within an engine. I am looking at a few books specifically and was wondering if anyone knew if they covered it, as most of the books I have looked at in the past have not. I should note I've looked at the rastertek one but I'd love a few more resources to compare them.

Books are

Introduction to 3D Programming with DirectX12 - Out of interest...how is this released without DX12 being released? Will the management of shaders change much with DX12? I imagine so but I am not well read on DX12.

Real Time Rendering DirectX HLSL

Thanks folks.

It's not released yet. Or I might be crazy and think it's 2015 when it's actually 2016

The book will release in December.

I don't know a lot of books that'd bother with the specifics like that. You could try taking a look at Game Engine Architecture. But it might not have everything you need to know. So... you'll want to take a look at an actual engine. I'd recommend dissecting Nebula trifid. It's well developed and the code is clean enough to speed through.

And lastly, usually the way they handle them are in a multileveled design. Shaders are held in memory by a resource manager that only loads it once. Textures are swapped into the shaders when needed, which are also already loaded once.

The only book I know that (kind of) covers this topic is GPU Pro 3 (Chapter V.4 Designing a Data-Driven Renderer).

There's also a lot of topics on GameDev.net about this (look for Hodgman replies):

Link 1 (you should probably read this one carefully)

Link 2

Link 3

Link 4

Link 5

Link 6

Link 7

Link 8

Link 9

Link 10

Link 11

Link 12

Link 13

You should find lots of info in those links.

Tangletail...I didn't even realise it said end of this year. Slightly embarassing. I've tried GAE but it does not go into details on shader management, or I overlooked it. I'll check out the engine over the next week, hopefully it will bear fruit.

Thanks Tiago, I tried the search function myself - honesty! But I couldn't find anything so I figured I'd ask. I'll work my way through the items you linked.