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androidopengl-esshader
Markus A.
Markus A.

Reputation: 12762

Android OpenGL ES shader compiler support

The OpenGL ES 2.0 Specs state that "[s]hader compiler support is optional" (see "Notes" here).

Are there any Android devices that do not support shader compilation? If so, is there some shader compiler that I can include with my app to generate a binary instead? Or is the format of the binary also standardized so that I can precompile my shaders before hand and ship the binary with my app if needed? Or is there a requirement I can put into my app so that it isn't offered to devices without compiler support?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1011

Answers (1)

Morrison Chang
Morrison Chang

Reputation: 12121

Since Android 4.0 (actually 3.0 but Google/Android never released the code as distinct product) OpenGL ES 2.0 has always been part of the spec required to get Android Market/Google Play. See: Android 4.0 Compatibility Definition Document and Android Compatibility Definition Document Archive for the other versions.

Since OpenGL ES 2.0 uses shaders written in OpenGL ES Shader Language I believe your reference to 'optional' for the Shader Compiler refers to the fact the driver vendor can provide a different interface (binary) to load shaders in. Given that there is no specified binary format, everyone as far as I can tell has got GLSL text fed into the graphics driver to build the shaders at runtime. And don't forget there are multiple GPU vendors/chipsets so specific binaries for each doesn't look too attractive from a developer point of view at least in the multi CPU architecture (ARM,x86,MIPS) multi GPU (Qualcomm,PowerVR,nVidia) world of Android. Vendors can still interpret the text differently but at least it would be within the proscribed Khronos spec.

Since text is the what is being sent over to the GPU driver, well performance could be better since it has to do the translation, mapping, scheduling, etc. which leads to the recent announcement for Vulkan see: Android Developer Blog Vulkan Announcement. If you look at the specs, it describes an intermediate binary format but is probably at least a year away from a consumer available implementation.

Unless your intention is to support Gingerbread (2.3) and below - you should be able to rely upon OpenGL ES 2.0 availability.

Upvotes: 1

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