ShaderGlass

Optimized Fork

GPU shader overlay for Windows desktop | 1200+ RetroArch shaders | DirectX 11

Forked from mausimus/ShaderGlass with performance optimizations, critical bug fixes, and modernized build tooling.

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What's Changed

Performance Ping-pong feedback buffers -- Eliminates CopyResource per frame by alternating texture read/write roles between passes Batched GPU bindings -- Single PSSetSamplers / PSSetShaderResources call per pass instead of per-texture Direct texture pointers -- Cached raw ID3D11Texture2D* alongside owning com_ptrs for zero-overhead access in the render loop O(1) parameter lookup -- unordered_map replaces linear search in SetParam Unconditional CB uploads -- Removed broken dirty tracking that never saved work

Bug Fixes CopyAttribute stale-HRESULT -- Was checking a global static from a previous call instead of the actual return value Release build crash -- assert(false) compiled out, causing null deref on shader compile failure GrabOutput crash -- Missing null check on captured frame Resource leaks -- COM pointers not released in cleanup paths NULL deref in catch -- Dead catch block iterated a NULL array Save dialog -- Wrong flag (OFN_FILEMUSTEXIST on a save dialog) Uninitialized members -- Garbage preset index on first hotkey use

Code Quality

Area	Improvement
Error handling	THROW_IF_FAILED(hr) macro with file, line, and expression context -- added across the entire codebase
Thread safety	RAII ThreadHandle wrapper replaces raw CreateThread / CloseHandle
Input validation	Bounds-checked parsing for all shader config values with overflow protection
Build warnings	Fixed wchar_t narrowing conversion (5x per build); total warnings reduced from 7 to 2
Repo size	Removed ~186 MB of pre-built binaries from version control

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Building

Visual Studio 2026  |  C++20  |  Windows SDK 10.0.26100  |  Release | x64

# Open and build
ShaderGlass.sln  -->  Release | x64

See CLAUDE.md for full architecture docs, threading model, shader pipeline details, and development notes.

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Screenshots

Desktop Glass Mode -- transparent overlay applies shaders to anything behind it

Window Clone Mode -- capture a specific window with pixel-perfect scaling

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Original project by mausimus | Upstream Repo | GPLv3 | Shaders from libretro/slang-shaders