(This is the documentation for SDL3, which is the current stable version. SDL2 was the previous version!)

SDL_CreateGPUShader

Creates a shader to be used when creating a graphics pipeline.

Header File

Syntax

SDL_GPUShader* SDL_CreateGPUShader(
    SDL_GPUDevice *device,
    const SDL_GPUShaderCreateInfo *createinfo);

Function Parameters

SDL_GPUDevice *	device	a GPU Context.
const SDL_GPUShaderCreateInfo *	createinfo	a struct describing the state of the shader to create.

Return Value

(SDL_GPUShader *) Returns a shader object on success, or NULL on failure; call SDL_GetError() for more information.

Remarks

Shader resource bindings must be authored to follow a particular order depending on the shader format.

For SPIR-V shaders, use the following resource sets:

For vertex shaders:

0: Sampled textures, followed by storage textures, followed by storage buffers
1: Uniform buffers

For fragment shaders:

2: Sampled textures, followed by storage textures, followed by storage buffers
3: Uniform buffers

For DXBC and DXIL shaders, use the following register order:

For vertex shaders:

(t[n], space0): Sampled textures, followed by storage textures, followed by storage buffers
(s[n], space0): Samplers with indices corresponding to the sampled textures
(b[n], space1): Uniform buffers

For pixel shaders:

(t[n], space2): Sampled textures, followed by storage textures, followed by storage buffers
(s[n], space2): Samplers with indices corresponding to the sampled textures
(b[n], space3): Uniform buffers

For MSL/metallib, use the following order:

[[texture]]: Sampled textures, followed by storage textures
[[sampler]]: Samplers with indices corresponding to the sampled textures
[[buffer]]: Uniform buffers, followed by storage buffers. Vertex buffer 0 is bound at [[buffer(14)]], vertex buffer 1 at [[buffer(15)]], and so on. Rather than manually authoring vertex buffer indices, use the [[stage_in]] attribute which will automatically use the vertex input information from the SDL_GPUGraphicsPipeline.

Shader semantics other than system-value semantics do not matter in D3D12 and for ease of use the SDL implementation assumes that non system-value semantics will all be TEXCOORD. If you are using HLSL as the shader source language, your vertex semantics should start at TEXCOORD0 and increment like so: TEXCOORD1, TEXCOORD2, etc. If you wish to change the semantic prefix to something other than TEXCOORD you can use SDL_PROP_GPU_DEVICE_CREATE_D3D12_SEMANTIC_NAME_STRING with SDL_CreateGPUDeviceWithProperties().

Version

This function is available since SDL 3.1.3.