A draw that met a new pipeline waited 3 ms for its fast link, in every frame, which is just under what the link takes with the stage libraries in the driver's cache: in a first-visit session on a new install 66 of 87 such draws gave up at the end of the wait and their frame was held back. The wait is now 8 ms for each pipeline, counted from its first miss and shared by all its draws, and 16 ms for a frame, so a pipeline the driver has to compile costs one frame the wait and the frames after it nothing.
The pipeline list tool also takes the compute variants a game folder dispatched, which no pipeline record names and which were translated in the middle of play, and reads a list made before as one of its inputs.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.2 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The preparation translates every shader and builds each one's stage library, so a pipeline a draw meets for the first time is linked in 2 to 6 ms. A mesh pipeline has no stage libraries: on an install that never drew it, it compiles whole in play, 0.2 to 1.1 s with its draws left out of the picture (18 of them on a first visit of Kokiri Forest). Whole pipelines were built ahead only from the folder's own pipeline-keys.bin.
tools/pipeline_list.py merge folds the pipeline-keys.bin and shader-answers.bin of game folders that were played into one list file: every key record once, with the answers record of each shader it names. A record names its shaders by input id, which depends on the game's code and the answers alone, and holds the game's pipeline state; what depends on the GPU is derived when the pipeline is built, so a record made on one machine is good on another with the same game version and runtime. Four folders on this PC give 5,432 records, 317 of them mesh pipelines (147 KB of keys).
tools/prepare_shaders.py reads the list (tools/data/pipeline_list.bin, data/pipeline_list.bin in a release folder, or --pipeline-list), adds its shader variants to the seed and writes its records as seed-pipeline-keys.bin. nx2navi.exe --prepare-shaders builds the mesh pipelines among them after the seed is translated and saves the pipeline cache before the stage libraries are built (NX2NAVI_PREPARE_PIPELINES=all builds the vertex pipelines too); --warm-shaders does it again after an update or a new driver, and --prepare-pipelines is that step alone. The pipelines go into the caches and are not kept or added to the folder's own key file, so they cost no start-up time or video memory until a draw meets them. A marker file keeps a driver that crashes on one of them from failing every preparation.
The list is derived from game data and stays out of the repository: check_content.py refuses files recorded from a game folder by their first bytes, and make_kit.py, make_launcher.py and make_release.py carry a list given with --pipeline-list. All three now also carry pipeline_list.py, which prepare_shaders.py imports.
Checked without the game: tests/pipeline_list_test.py, and prepare_shaders.py --no-run on the game files with a list of 317 mesh pipelines (all 266 shader variants found in this game version, 177 new to the seed). The build step in nx2navi.exe compiles and links and has not been run.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.2 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The translator turns the larger programs of agl_ndsr.pck and agl_ndsr_vr.pck into 3-12.6 MB of SPIR-V, which the GPU driver took 34 s to 44 minutes each to build: 19,400 of the 21,750 s every compute variant took together, most of the install's hour of driver builds. Play met none of them that was slow to build, so the default variants of those programs above 16 KB of code are left out; agl_ndsr_vr_light.pck, whose programs play meets, stays whole. --all-shaders prepares them too.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The install step seeded only 63% of the programs a play session met under their run-time code hash. A Switch 2 program with an empty c1 range past its code was hashed with that range, the Switch 2 agl and NDSR packages had no reader, and Layout2Shader/ was not walked. It now seeds 99.3% of the programs play asks for.
A default variant's answers are read again from its first translation (runtime/gfx_shader_guess.c): vertex inputs the shader reads as integers become uint, and a compute shader takes the texture and image types its translation declares. Task and mesh defaults carry the workgroup words play answers with. Against a play session's recorded variants, --prepare-shaders now matches 98.3%; the plain default guess matched 89.5%.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The shader reader now reads Switch 2 (NVN2) programs, whose 0xe0-byte control sections and task and mesh stages the
runtime keys as it does, and runs on Python 3.12 through the zstandard package. The kit's new last step writes the
36,031 shaders of the player's game files as a seed and runs ocarina.exe --prepare-shaders, which translates them and
has the GPU driver build each one's library, about 5 minutes. On a cold walk into play this took the stalls from
14 seconds of pipeline builds and 9 of translations to none.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Comments say what the code does and why, docs/maxwell.md keeps the Maxwell facts, and fetch_refs.sh clones only the checkout the build reads. Code is unchanged.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The names are NX2NAVI, NX2navi or nx2navi: the settings prefix (NX2NAVI_*), the ini file
(nx2navi.ini), the shader translator (nx2navi_xlate), the Windows resources, the installer and the docs. The 8-byte
file magics keep their size (NX2NSANS, NX2NSPRG, NX2NSPRP, NX2NPKEY, NX2NRFS1), so caches and the RomFS index from
older builds are not read. cfg.c and the settings pages took the prefix length as 5; it now follows the prefix.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
