Compatibility mode doesn't support compute shaders nor dynamic buffers

[coderjo]

There are two things I discussed here:

• Compute shaders. @hexgrid said it’s an OpenGL 4.3 feature, apparently not available on compatibility mode.
• Dynamic buffers. This topic is simply about transferring data to VRAM while avoiding redundant copying.

To solve the latter, I tried to define a uniform, but there’s a max size of 65536=2^16 bytes, and you can only use statically sized arrays.

How to exchange data with shaders efficiently?

Godot Version ^4.2 Question I used to create an Image for an ImageTexture to display a pixel grid onto a Sprite2D. However, it is certainly not as efficient as the shader, due to the large switch (format) statement of the Image.set_pixel method (and other reasons). I thought it would be easy, but the uniform does not support any “vector” stuff.

Therefore, I focused on ImageTexture and Image. The problem became avoiding double copies: my data on RAM -> image data on RAM -> VRAM, so the idea became how to let the Image.get_data() directly return the address of my data, as in the post section below.

@coderjo

It just feels like Godot shuts all the doors to what originally could be done easily, like implementing an ImageView, or at least make the methods virtual, leaving it to the developers.