I noticed in 4.26 they added support for windows metal shader compilation (see attached) but I am a bit confused about this because I never had to remote compile shaders on my Mac even on version 4.25. Under what situations did you have to remote compile shaders on Mac? Like when would this be useful?
I did some digging on this today and it seems that without the windows metal toolchain installed the shaders will be stored as text. What I assume this means is that the shaders are going to be sent to the device as text and then compiled at app runtime. I guess what this gives us is the ability to avoid the compilation of metal shaders at runtime, which may have some performance benefit.
in 4.25 the only way to do this was to remote compile the shaders on a mac. it seems in 4.26 the remote shader compiling option has been completely removed because the checkbox to enable remote shader compiling in the ios project settings is gone. I guess the only supported way to pre compile the shaders now is via the windows metal toolchain.
I don’t know for sure if this is the case but that’s what it looks like is going on anyways, if somebody can confirm that the above is correct that would be great.