Shader Program Buffer
| RwShaderProgramBuffer | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| aka PixelShader, VertexShader, and ShaderProgramState | |||
| Type ID | 0x12 | ||
| Category | Generic | ||
| Memory distribution |
Shader in Main Memory Buffer in secondary Buffer in Graphics System (PS3) | ||
| Imported by | Shader Technique | ||
| Editor available? |
No | ||
The shader program buffer, as the name suggests, describes a buffer for compiled shaders. Shaders are platform-specific and their formats vary greatly, and differences between pixel shaders and vertex shaders double this diversity. This makes documenting the formats extremely challenging; as such, although attempts have been made to do so, they will most likely remain undocumented on this wiki. Some basic information is provided below.
PlayStation 3 uses shaders compiled with NVIDIA's Cg compiler. The primary resource portion has a discernible header, but for the most part it is made up of the the _CGprogram structure, which is unfortunately not publicly documented and does not appear in any symbols. The secondary resource portion (present only in pixel shaders) is usually null, though it can sometimes contain garbage near the end. These do vary in size, however, indicating they are valid resources and get loaded into memory. See NVIDIA's reference manual or the SCE PS3 SDK for more information.
For information on Xbox 360 and PC shaders, see Microsoft's documentation of ps_3_0 and vs_3_0. Note that PC shaders are compiled at runtime from source code contained in Shader resources using Microsoft HLSL 9.2; they are cached in %LOCALAPPDATA%/Criterion Games/Burnout Paradise/ShaderCache.
PC (Remastered) and PlayStation 4 shaders were compiled with Microsoft HLSL 10.1. The format appears identical on both platforms; this is likely true on Xbox One as well. See Tim Jones' blog post on parsing the DXBC format for more information. Note that because PC hardware configurations differ, the compiled shaders that ship with PC (Remastered) are optimized at runtime; these are not cached.
Nintendo Switch shaders use a proprietary NVIDIA format. In addition to the compiled shader, their buffers contain what appears to be complete (albeit uncommented) uncompiled assembly code for the shader, if not the source code itself. There is further uncompiled shader code in the executable.