Debugging Tools for Unity Compute Shaders

Questions & Answers
1

Is there a clean way to debug Compute Shaders running with Unity?

I see that graphics shaders can be debugged with MS Visual Studios when enabling debug symbol params. I don’t see any documentation for Compute Shader debugging params or suggested tools.

There’s always the dumping intermediate values into a spare texture, but this is slow, and requires modification of both the shader and scripts to print out data, not to mention grepping for relevant vectors.

2

You can try following the guide here:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/debugging-shaders-in-visual-studio.322186/

And here:

3

Thanks Elecman, I’ll give that guide a try, though I’m trying this with an Intel graphics chip. Not sure if the vendor needs to supply libraries for this functionality with VS.
And note Intel GPA doesn’t seem to support this functionality for DX11.

In any case this I’ve been using Renderdoc from Crytek.

You can just launch an executable with this tool. Seems to work with most things including compute shaders.

However currenlty you’ll have to debug assembly. But buffers/textures are easy enough to inspect.