When writing shaders, I often find that what works on one card does not work on another. Specifically, since I’m using nvidia everywhere, users with ATI usually end up suffering.
The obvious budget-dependent solution to that is to buy a machine just to put an ATI card in. However, the errors are usually syntax errors of various kinds; once those are fixed, it tends to run well enough. So, I’m wondering:
Since I don’t actually need to run them (I should, but I don’t have to), it should be possible for ATI to create a standalone program that just test-compiles shaders. I can’t find anything like that. Do you know?
Lacking that, is there a service somewhere that would let me test-compile shaders on a variety of hardware?
Lacking that, would someone be interested in helping me make one? I can do the programming, if you have a server with an ATI card sitting around to deal with that half of the equation.
AMD do just that - they provide a great tool called GPUShaderAnalyser which does a great job of compiling your shaders and shows you various compilation results for different h/w. It’s a free down load from their site.