ShaderOS - Shader Diagnostics and Health Monitoring for Unity

Managing shaders and materials in Unity can quickly become a bottleneck for performance and build stability. From missing texture references to exceeding Unity's strict shader keyword limits, problems often stay hidden until you attempt to compile a player build.

ShaderOS is a read-only, editor-only utility that gives you immediate, single-click visibility into the health of your project’s shaders and materials. Designed for technical artists, indie developers, and studio teams, ShaderOS acts as a preventative linting tool. It analyzes your materials and shaders inside the Editor, identifying broken references, misconfigured texture slots, and SRP Batcher incompatibilities in seconds. It also provides key metrics on global and local shader keywords, helping you stay safely within Unity's budget limits before compile failures occur.

Because ShaderOS is completely read-only, it never modifies or deletes any of your project assets. It operates with a zero-runtime footprint, meaning no code or assemblies are ever compiled into your player builds.

KEY FEATURES

• Material Health Scan: Scan all materials in a single click. ShaderOS grades materials with a 0 to 100 health score, subtracting penalty points for critical issues like broken shader references and missing texture slots.
• Keyword Budget Tracker: Monitor global keyword usage against Unity’s hard 256-keyword limit, and check local per-shader counts against the 64-keyword limit. Shared keyword duplicates are flagged to highlight consolidation opportunities.
• Variant Estimator: View theoretical pre-strip upper-bound variant counts for all shaders. Identify high-risk shaders with excessive keyword dimensions before they lead to long build times.
• SRP Batcher Analyzer: Automatically assess whether custom shaders meet the strict CBUFFER requirements for SRP Batcher draw-call batching under URP or HDRP.
• Interactive Demo Mode: Explore a pre-populated synthetic shader report immediately upon import. Test every tab and diagnostic view with realistic data without scanning your own project first.
• Build-Time Tracking: Record and save shader compilation times locally after every build, allowing you to monitor timing regressions on your development machine.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

• Editor-Only Design: Zero runtime overhead. ShaderOS adds no assemblies, scripts, or compiled bytes to your player builds.
• Project-Wide Settings: Saved to ProjectSettings/ShaderOSProjectSettings.asset. Commit this file to version control to share configurations across your team.
• No Package Dependencies: Zero external package dependencies are required to run the tool.
• Thread Execution: Runs synchronously on the Unity main thread to process project materials.
• Data Persistence: Project Settings persist across sessions. Material scan results are held in memory only and reset on domain reloads (such as script compilation or entering Play Mode).

COMPATIBILITY

• Supported Unity Versions: Unity 2021.3 LTS or newer (tested and verified on Unity 2021.3 LTS, 2022.3 LTS, 2023.2, and Unity 6).
• Render Pipelines: Built-in Render Pipeline (BiRP), Universal Render Pipeline (URP), and High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP).
• Shader Frameworks: Compatible with hand-authored .shader files, Shader Graph, and VFX Graph.
• Platform Support: Editor-only tool. Runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux Unity Editor environments.

FREE EDITION 

The free edition of ShaderOS provides robust diagnostic scanning but includes the following built-in limitations:

• 100-Material Cap: Scans are limited to a maximum of 100 materials per run. To analyze larger projects, you must use the Folder scope in Project Settings to scan subdirectories sequentially.
• Manual Consolidation Only: Automated keyword conflict resolution and auto-merge tools are not available. Consolidating duplicate keywords must be handled manually.
• Count-Only Strip Estimates: The Strip candidates column estimates how many local keywords have no active material usage, but the names of specific strippable keywords are hidden.
• No Dependency Graph: The full interactive Material to Shader to Texture dependency model is excluded from the free edition.
• No Variant Intelligence: Advanced features—such as the Variant Explosion Predictor, automated stripping recommendations, ShaderVariantCollection generator, and per-build regression alerts—are unavailable.
• Capped Build History: The local build tracker retains only the last 10 builds on your machine.

LIMITATIONS

• Memory-Only Scans: Scan results are transient and do not persist across Editor domain reloads, script compilations, or entering Play Mode. You must run a quick re-scan after these events.
• Pre-Strip Estimations: Variant counts are calculated as theoretical upper bounds based on keyword dimensions before Unity's build-time stripping. A shader reporting millions of theoretical variants may compile into fewer than 10,000 in a real build.
• Local-Only Build History: Build tracker logs are stored locally on each machine. They do not sync through version control and will not match between different developers or CI runners.
• SRP Batcher Source Limits: SRP Batcher checks for custom shaders use Layer 2 source-text parsing (scanning for CBUFFER_START(UnityPerMaterial)). Built-in shaders and closed Shader Graph outputs without accessible disk source cannot be parsed and will display as Unknown.
• Main-Thread Scan Block: Because scanning runs on Unity's main thread, extremely large projects or those containing materials with corrupted SerializedObject references may experience brief Editor unresponsiveness during a scan.

Documentation / Support

•  Discord
• Bug Reports
• Documentation
• Direct Support Email: support.toolsstudio@gmail.com

Asset Store

ShaderOS