Thanks again @Qwiff! Very true, I'm finding the GPU trace's access to buffers, geometry and textures seems to go a long way. Sharing your workflow/experience is very helpful to me (a n00b). As you said, if I can jam a debug-value in a debug buffer it gets be pretty close... just a bit annoying/time-suck given there's code setup and removal once I figure out what's wrong.

@Iolo, When you say When you're able to get metal-source to work, ..., does that mean metal-source doesn't work on the currrent betas (1,2)? Thanks.

@Iolo, I've tried air-lipo. Even though metal-source doesn't fail with this thin file, it produces a directory, not a JSON file. I've tried feeding this directory and JSON files in the directory, nothing gets me a GPU native binary using the metal command, as per the session video). So it still doesn't seem possible to harvest a Pipeline JSON file that can ultimately be used to generate a GPU binary.

@Iolo, one of the files in the directory produced by metal-source, look sort of like mtlp-json in the session video. I've uploaded the file and file listing of the directory in this gist. Again, trying to use this file or the directory with metal to produce a GPU native binary did not work.