Rendering & GPU / Tools & Plugins / Shaders / In the Lab · 2026 · Shipped
GPULab
Seven runnable lessons in low-level GPU programming for UE 5.8 — global shaders, compute, RDG, buffers and ping-pong simulation — written to be read.
- Role
- Author
- Team
- Solo
- Context
- Teaching resource
- Timeline
- 2026
- Status
- Shipped
Highlights
- Every lesson is a shader you can run, paint into a render target and look at
- Two tracks — Docs explain the finished code, Tutorial builds it from an empty folder
- Written from the UE 5.8 engine source, with every API checked against the headers
Overview
Unreal's low-level rendering path — FGlobalShader, shader parameter structs, the Render Dependency Graph — is powerful and thinly documented. GPULab is the resource I wanted when I started: a self-contained UE 5.8 plugin where every concept comes with a compute or pixel shader you can run and see.
It's also the foundation the Snow and Sand deformation plugins are built on.
The lessons
| # | Lesson | The one idea |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Hello Compute | The three pieces every GPU program in Unreal needs |
| 02 | Parameters | How a number gets from C++ into a shader |
| 03 | Threads and Groups | What "parallel" actually means, drawn as a picture |
| 04 | Buffers and Readback | Arrays in, arrays out, and why reading results is slow |
| 05 | Multi-Pass RDG | Two passes, one graph, and the barriers you didn't write |
| 06 | Pixel Shader Pass | The other half of the GPU: drawing triangles |
| 07 | Persistent Simulation | Keeping state alive across frames with ping-pong textures |
Designed to be learned from
A GPULab Demo actor builds its own UAV render target and runs any lesson on a plane, live in the editor viewport — pick a lesson from a dropdown and tweak its parameters in the Details panel without touching code. Each lesson is also a plain Blueprint node, so wiring it up by hand teaches the setup you'll use for your own shaders.
There are two ways through the material. Docs explain the finished code one concept per chapter; Tutorial walks you through writing your own version from an empty folder, with a check at every step. The comments are deliberately far denser than production code — it's a textbook you can compile.
Sources, not tutorials
GPULab was written by reading the Unreal Engine 5.8 source directly. Every lesson ends with a "Where this comes from" section listing the exact engine files behind it, alongside Epic's documentation and community write-ups. The engine paths are the primary source on purpose: they match your exact engine version, and unlike a blog post, they can't go out of date.
All lessons were verified running on D3D12 against UE 5.8.
Repository
Learn low-level GPU programming in Unreal Engine 5: FGlobalShader, compute shaders and RDG, as seven small runnable lessons with plain-English docs.
- C++98.6%
- C#1.4%
- Last push
- Sep 2026