When managing shader’s, does it make sense to have all of them compiled and in memory at all times? Or is it better to have only the shader’s I need in memory, and unload those that have not been used for awhile?
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When managing shader’s, does it make sense to have all of them compiled and in memory at all times? Or is it better to have only the shader’s I need in memory, and unload those that have not been used for awhile?
Depending on the app, the most important factor will probably be that you dont want to have a blocking situation where the current frame needs a material that uses an unloaded shader, and you must reload/compile it before the frame can continue rendering, hence blocking rendering and possibly causing a hiccup in framerate. If you can avoid this and pre-emptively reload shaders just before you need them, then it should be OK.
But I would first do some memory profiling to see how much memory the shaders are taking up – it seems to me like a micro-optimisation (unless you have some obscenely large number of loaded shaders). My guess is you would save a lot more memory by focusing on textures.