Editing Mesa (computer graphics) (section)

=== shader-db ===
shader-db is a collection of about 20,000 [[shader]]s gathered from various computer games and benchmarks as well as some scripts to compile these and collect some statistics. Shader-db is intended to help validate an optimization.

It was noticed that an unexpected number of shaders are not hand-written but generated. This means these shaders were originally written in [[HLSL]] and then translated into GLSL by some translator program, such as e.g. [[HLSL2GLSL]]. The problem is, that the generated code is often far from being optimal. Matt Turner said it was much easier to fix this in the translator program than having to make Mesa's compiler carry the burden of dealing with such bloated shaders.

shader-db cannot be considered free and open-source software. To use it legally, one must have a license for all the computer games that the shaders are part of.