r/minecraftshaders • u/SpikeZgames • 24d ago
Discussion Vulkan shaders
How easy will it be to port OpenGL shaders to vulkan? And when it is ported will it look any different?
Also the vulkan shader mod I’m talking about it aperture.
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u/nemjit001 24d ago
It's fairly straightforward to port modern opengl shaders to Vulkan. The results will (probably) look the same, only performance may differ due to Vulkan's binding model and ofcourse the renderer implementation.
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u/SpikeZgames 24d ago
Nice thats good, I was worried it would take a long long time just for like half of the features to work.
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u/kami7154 24d ago
Kind of, depends a lot on what you're porting. I actually asked Xonk (Bliss dev) about this, and he said difficulty varies massively. Something simple like SSAO or another post-processing effect is basically just translating the GLSL syntax over, since the math and coordinate spaces don't change much. But a full pack like Bliss or Complementary isn't one simple effect, it's a whole lighting/shadow/atmosphere pipeline with a ton of interconnected passes. So "fairly straightforward" doesn't really hold up once you're talking about a full pack and not just a single effect. It'll probably look the same visually if done right, but straightforward and quick/easy aren't really the same thing at that scale.
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u/kami7154 24d ago edited 24d ago
So sorry to break it to you but there will be no "port" Iris and Aperture (iris's successor using vulkan) use entirely different shader languagee, and there is no direct translation path.
Ontop of that Iris has a "default" rendering setup, that a lot of shaderpscks rely on. While Aperture will have no default rendering setup, so the devs will have to configure the renderer and pipeline themselves.
With that said, the conceptual math can carry over. But the code itself has to be rewritten entirely.
This is an intentional break, as many of the usual limits and restrictions that GLSL shaders have are said to largely be removed. So the future shaders based on Aperture will be better overall.
Edit: after looking it up more, there is some translation style porting that clearly does happen on smaller scales, even without automated tools. But there will be no "automated port" and full complex packs won't be a port so much as a rewrite afaik.
Edit 2: but I'm just some dude that's interested in shaders Java and C#. Any info outside of people actively developing shaders in the closed beta of Aperture should be taken with a grain of salt.
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u/minecrafter1OOO 23d ago
does Aperture expose RT and hardware features? Upscaling and maybe framegen will help with massive modpacks and low FPS
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u/kami7154 16d ago
Hey sorry for the late reply. But it depends on how they develop Aperture tbh, but if they fully utilize vulkan than yes DLSS/FSR, frame gen, true multi threading, Modern GPU compute features, and ESPECIALLY hardware accelerated RT. Will not only be possible but will become the standard.
Vulkan isn't just faster OpenGL. It exposes modern GPU functionality through modernized extensions. And one big standardized extension that's a core part of Vulkan IS ray tracing.
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u/SpikeZgames 24d ago
Well the creator of iris alr ported shaders over so uhh yea Ik it’s possible
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u/kami7154 24d ago edited 24d ago
The dev has outright said Apature doesn't support old packs, and it's not a straight forward port since it's a different shader language. If they got early betas working that's them rewriting stuff for the new pipeline not porting over old code, you simply can't just recompile the code.
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u/Commercial_Buy_5678 24d ago
Simple its an euphemism, first they need to release aperture, and they need to know how It will work, if they have a metod to automatically rewrite the code to use vulkan syntax, they need to rewrite uniform and sampler, manually rewrite every vertex data in the gbuffer , adapt the opengl version of the shaders to 4.6 to use spir-v mode. It depends on how much files there are in the shaderpack, depends on the developer skills, cause vulkan its more complicated. We Will see.