Effects gallery

What you're running

Thirteen of these are the benchmark's own scenes: five Signature (WebGL2, three.js loads only when you open one) and the eight Classic effects from v1 (Canvas 2D). They are the exact renderers the benchmark measures, minus the measurement — no ramp, no frame-time windows, no score. Hover a Classic tile and it animates in place.

The other 24 are the Shader tier: single fullscreen fragment shaders, written by other people and shipped here under licences that permit it. They carry no library at all, so every tile shows a real frame from its own shader, and hovering one plays it. They are not part of any score and never will be; the 13-scene benchmark workload has been frozen since 2.2.0.

Hypernova, Flux Core, and Demoparty flash hard enough to need a warning, so they ask before they play, and “Don't ask again” makes this browser remember. The flashing shaders' tiles also stay still until you've said yes. Everything else opens straight away.

The knobs

Every scene opens with three controls in the bottom strip, and every shader adds its own:

The heaviest shaders open below native resolution so they start smooth; the quality control takes them back up. The fps readout is live, so the gallery doubles as a manual stress test: max the load on Nebula Drift or Alien Beacon and watch what your GPU is made of. For a number you can compare, run the scored benchmark — same scenes, fixed workload, published methodology.

Two of these are test patterns, not decoration

Static Field is uncorrelated noise, a fresh value in every pixel every frame. Nothing a display or a video pipeline can predict, which makes it the hardest thing either has to draw — run it fullscreen and slow pixel response shows as smearing, while a compressed stream (casting, remote desktop, a screen share) falls apart outright. If you are chasing smearing specifically, the ghosting test isolates it properly; this is the brute-force version.

Alien Beacon and Overcast are the heaviest shaders here — about 12 ms a frame at 1080p on an M2 Max, before any supersampling. At a high sample count either one is a sustained GPU load: useful for hearing when fans spin up, or for watching a laptop thermally throttle in real time on the fps readout.

Credits

The Shader tier is other people's work. Each scene keeps its author's licence header in the shipped source, and the table below credits the author and links back to the original. Only permissive licences are used — Shadertoy's default terms are non-commercial, which this site cannot honor, so a shader without an explicit MIT or CC0 grant does not get added no matter how good it looks.