Why convert PSSL to CG?
People land here because Cg is syntactically close to HLSL, so it seems like a natural target for a PS4 shader. In practice the PSSL compiler ships only inside Sony's licensed devkit and emits GPU binaries, not portable Cg text, and Cg itself is a dead end. Most teams instead move PSSL to a maintained language such as .HLSL.
How to convert PSSL to CG
Hand-port to HLSL, then Cg if truly needed OPEN-SOURCE
Rewrite the PSSL entry points as HLSL in an editor, then feed that HLSL to NVIDIA's legacy cgc compiler with cgc -profile vp40 shader.hlsl if a Cg profile is genuinely required.
Translate via ShaderConductor OPEN-SOURCE
After manually converting PSSL to HLSL, use Microsoft's ShaderConductor to cross-compile that HLSL to GLSL/MSL; there is no Cg backend, so Cg remains a manual step.
About these formats
A .pssl file holds shader code written in Sony's PlayStation Shader Language, the GPU programming language used for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 game development. Text-based .pssl files…
Open .PSSL details →
.CG
nVidia CgFX file
A .CG file is associated with nVidia CgFX, a 3d image file.
Open .CG details →Quality & what to watch
- No automated tool reads
.pssloutside Sony's NDA-restricted PS4/PS5 SDK. - Cg was officially deprecated by NVIDIA in 2012 and receives no updates, so porting into it is usually a step backward.
- PS4-specific hardware intrinsics in the PSSL source have no Cg equivalent and must be dropped or reimplemented.
