Using DirectX Compiler Tools

Introduction

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.