> Compiling shaders directly from a high level representation to the GPU ISA only really happens on consoles.
When targeting Apple platforms, you can use the metal-tt tool to precompile your shaders to ISA. You give it a list of target triples and a JSON file that describes your PSO. metal-tt comes with Xcode, and is also available for Windows as part of the Game Porting Toolkit.
Unfortunately, most people don’t do that. They’re spoiled by the Steam monoculture, in which Steam harvests the compiled ISA from gamers’ machines and makes it available on Valve’s CDN.
metal-tt/metal-nt require you to specify the exact architecture, and that's not forward-compatible unless you update your application for every new device release. Even minor SKU revisions like applegpu_g13p/applegpu_g13g/applegpu_g13s/applegpu_g13c are different compilation targets, and that doesn't help you when Apple releases applegpu_g14.
Yep. That’s why the artifact includes the IR, which can be compiled on first use on new architectures.