Godot Shader Warmup

Godot Shader Pipeline Warm-Up is a tool designed to eliminate first-use shader compilation stutter in Godot games. It works by discovering materials at editor time and warming them up incrementally during game startup, leading to smoother runtime performance.

Key Features

• Editor-time Discovery — Scans selected scenes to identify materials that will trigger pipeline creation.
• JSON Manifest — Creates a versionable file listing discovered material resource paths.
• Runtime Warm-up — A lightweight C++ GDExtension loads the manifest and touches materials across frames within a configurable time budget.
• Non-blocking Scheduling — Processes materials incrementally per frame to avoid blocking the main thread.
• Benchmarking Tools — Includes frame-time logging and a controller for fair comparison between baseline and warm-up runs.
• Command-line Overrides — Supports runtime toggling of warm-up via command-line arguments for testing.

Philosophy

The project prioritizes a deterministic, non-blocking approach to shader warm-up, trading a small, controlled startup cost for the elimination of unpredictable runtime stutters.