The HLSL on LLVM project provides a number of tools to create and manipulate DirectX shader programs.
After building the project, the tools described are available under the Debugbin or Releasebin subdirectories under the build target directory.
- dxc.exe
This command-line tool is a replacement for fxc, and accepts the same command-line switches.
- dndxc.exe
This tool provides a GUI to compile HLSL programs and examine details of compilation, including the output assembly, the container structure, and the optimizer stages run.
- dxexp.exe
This command-line tool checks whether the current setup is able to run experimental shaders, that is, shaders that use a driver's experimental shader support or that are not properly validated.
- dxa.exe
This command-line tool provides a number of options to assemble/disassemble a shader.
- dxr.exe
This command-line tool allows a shader file to be rewritten in a consistent style, and optionally trim unused declarations.
To run experimental shaders in a process, the following conditions must be met:
- A recent flight of Windows must be used.
- The 'Use developer features' must be set to 'Developer mode' in the 'For developers' page of Settings.
- For a 64-bit OS, the process should be a 64-bit process. This will be fixed to support 32-bit processes on a 64-bit OS.
- The process must call D3D12EnableExperimentalFeatures to enable the D3D12ExperimentalShaderModelsID setting. The ExecutionTest.cpp file under toolsclangunittestsHLSLExecutionTest.cpp has an example of how this can be done.
- The API used must be D3D12.