ShaderToyX

A small, native Shadertoy-style shader playground for Windows. Write a GLSL mainImage() function in the built-in editor, hit F5, and watch it run on your GPU — no browser, no dependencies, one executable.

ShaderToyX is written in plain C-style C++ against Win32 and OpenGL 3.3 Core. It has no third-party libraries: the GL loader, the editor panel and the renderer are all in the five source files under ShaderToyX/src/.

ShaderToyX is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Shadertoy or Beautypi.

Features

• Live GLSL editing with the same entry point and uniforms as Shadertoy (mainImage, iResolution, iTime, iTimeDelta, iFrame, iMouse, iDate, iSampleRate, iChannelTime, iChannelResolution, iChannel0–iChannel3)
• Multi-pass rendering: an Image tab plus up to four Buffer tabs (A–D), each backed by a ping-pong pair of RGBA16F framebuffers
• Compile errors shown per tab, with line numbers matching your code
• Pause / resume and reset-time controls, FPS and resolution readout
• Per-monitor DPI aware
• Toggle the editor panel with F1 for a full-window canvas

Work in progress

The Record, Speaker (sound) and Fullscreen toolbar buttons are present in the UI but not implemented yet. They currently do nothing when clicked.

Download

Prebuilt 64-bit binaries are on the Releases page. Download ShaderToyX-<version>-win64.zip, extract it anywhere, and run ShaderToyX.exe. There is no installer and nothing is written outside the folder you extract to. A matching -symbols.zip with the .pdb is attached to each release for crash analysis.

ShaderToyX needs a GPU driver with OpenGL 3.3 support, which every Windows 10/11 machine with up-to-date graphics drivers has.

Building

Requirements: Windows 10 or later and the MSVC C++ toolchain (Visual Studio 2026 or the standalone Build Tools, with the Desktop development with C++ workload). build.bat works with any recent MSVC version; the .vcxproj targets the v145 toolset, so older Visual Studio versions will need to retarget it to build from the IDE.

From the command line

build.bat calls cl.exe directly (no MSBuild) and writes the executables to a build/ directory in the repository root. It expects the MSVC x64 toolchain on PATH, so run it from an x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS, or call vcvarsall.bat x64 first:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\18\Community\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat" x64
cd \path\to\ShaderToyX
build.bat

build.bat            Build Debug and Release
build.bat debug      Build Debug only        -> build\debug\ShaderToyX.exe
build.bat release    Build Release only      -> build\release\ShaderToyX.exe
build.bat package    Build Release and zip it -> build\ShaderToyX-<ver>-win64.zip
build.bat clean      Delete the build\ directory

The script refuses to run if cl.exe is missing or the toolchain on PATH targets something other than x64.

build.bat package [version] produces the same zip files that a GitHub release contains. The version defaults to git describe --tags, so build.bat package v0.1.0 and a plain build.bat package on a tagged commit give identical output.

From Visual Studio

Open ShaderToyX.slnx, pick a configuration, and build. Output goes to the usual ShaderToyX\x64\<Configuration>\ folder.

Debug builds request a debug OpenGL context and log driver messages to the Visual Studio Output window (via OutputDebugString) when the driver supports KHR_debug.

Using it

The editor panel keeps a separate source buffer and error log for each tab. Compiling (F5) rebuilds every visible tab.

Shadertoy compatibility notes

• iMouse follows Shadertoy's convention: .xy is the drag position, .z is the click x (positive while the button is held, negative after release) and .w is the click y (positive only on the frame the button went down).
• iChannel0–iChannel3 are always bound to Buffer A–D respectively. Textures, video, audio, keyboard and cubemap inputs are not supported.
• Buffer ordering differs from Shadertoy. Here every buffer pass samples the previous frame's output of every buffer, including buffers that ran earlier in the same frame. On Shadertoy, Buffer B reading Buffer A sees A's current frame. Shaders that chain buffers within a frame will be one frame behind per hop.
• iTimeDelta keeps reporting the real frame time while paused.
• Resizing the window recreates the buffers, which clears their contents.

Continuous integration and releases

Every push and pull request to master runs the CI workflow on a Windows runner: it builds Debug and Release with build.bat, builds the .vcxproj with MSBuild as a sanity check, and uploads the Release executable as a workflow artifact.

Pushing a tag that starts with v runs the Release workflow, which builds, packages with build.bat package <tag>, and publishes a GitHub Release with auto-generated notes and the two zip files attached. To cut a release:

git tag v0.1.0
git push origin v0.1.0

Project layout

ShaderToyX/src/
  main.cpp      Win32 window, OpenGL context, main loop, uniform setup
  editor.*      Editor panel: tabs, code/error boxes, toolbar (pure Win32 controls)
  renderer.*    Full-screen quad and ping-pong framebuffers for the buffer passes
  shader.*      Wraps user code in a Shadertoy-compatible fragment shader and links it
  gl_lite.*     Minimal OpenGL 3.3 function loader (only what the app uses)
ShaderToyX/
  ShaderToyX.vcxproj    Visual Studio project (IDE builds)
  ShaderToyX.manifest   Application manifest (per-monitor DPI awareness)
.github/workflows/      CI and release automation
build.bat               Command-line build and packaging script

License

ShaderToyX is released under the MIT License.