[robbies]

Noooo, please don't do that. That is not the intention of that API at all!

The API was built so that the cost of compilation by the driver would only be done once (likely at install, or at driver update time). So the idea is that when you are installing your PC game, it is compiling all the shaders against the current driver rev and hardware in your machine. Then when you play the game, it just loads the locally compiled binaries so your game doesn't hitch at random times when the driver compiler decides to kick off a compilation pass.

However, the binary is very sensitive to the driver version (as it owns the compiler), and the hardware itself. The binaries will differ across vendors, vendor architectures, and even sub-revisions inside of a single architecture.

Bonus: This API was provided as part of the GL_ARB_ES2_compatibility extension, in order to ease porting from OpenGL ES 2 to (big) OpenGL. OpenGL has a different API/extension, glProgramBinary, that is preferred for OpenGL. glShaderBinary might not even really work on any desktop implementation.

Probably the best source for this, though this information is relatively...obfuscated: https://community.amd.com/thread/160440