I’m sure many of you would have seen shader toy before, its been around for a good few years, though I was surprised to discover it had been updated at some point in the last few months and gob-smacked at the amazing shaders it now demonstrates and speechless at some of the talent on show.
If you like good graphics and love shaders you have to check this out. Over 500 shaders have been uploaded, many of them, well at least the first few pages i’ve browsed through of the gallery so far are incredible and inspiring.
Shader Toy (probably best viewed in chrome or firefox)
The site is a webgl editor for shaders, allowing you to view a large collection of uploaded shaders showing off various effects and their shader code. In edition it can be used to write and test your own shader code in the browser.
Though there are simple shaders a large number of them are cutting-edge with high complexity, therefore you will need a modern (3-4 years old) gpu to get the most out of the site. You’ll also need a webgl enabled browser and its a good idea to have the latest version of which ever browser you use.
Nice resource, but is not for everyone since my old computer with DX10 card couldnt open some pages. Also is a mistake to post 12 shaders in the listing page. It takes forever to load some pages. Listing pages should have only animated gif images of the shader to allow for quick browsing.
Same couldn’t get it to work any good, DLed chrome which i had recently uninstalled as it was slow in FF but it was the same. Homepage taking forever to load and most shaders running at sub 10FPS
Yeah, I think I have to agree. As cool as it is having dynamic thumbnails of the effects in the gallery, a combination of webgl and performance hogging of many of the effects just make it too prone to failure. In Chrome any shader in the gallery view that failed to compile or timed out just killed the whole page. Firefox faired better but was much slower in showing the gallery.
That’s a shame for both of you and re-enforces the point made above that they really need to offer a none interactive gallery view. That at least would mean you can access just the specific effect page, though of course many of these shaders are very gpu intensive and some might rely on having modern cards, so there is no guarantee they will work for everyone.
It is a shame since as many others have commented some of the effects done there purely through shaders are very impressive.
Aye, i’m wondering if the same thing is happening as with the unity webplayer there (using the intel HD instead of the nvidia card which should be the default). Could explain the very slow fps.
you have to use chrome. i couldnt browse this previously so i have made up an alternative set of pages which are browseable, max 2 shaders per page:… at end is another version with 4 per page. sorry i didnt know where to post this, its useful here because it crashes everyones browser and this makes it viewable and organised:
couldn’t get it to work any good, DLed chrome which i had recently uninstalled as it was slow in FF but it was the same. Homepage taking forever to load and most shaders running at sub 10FPS