>>716342681
Oh man you have no idea how shitty the shader situation is in Godot.
It does have a real system like you described, it's called Computer Shaders and they do indeed tap into the rendering pipeline and let you do whatever you want.
The catch? It's relatively new and there's like ZERO fucking resources on how to use it.

You wanna know how most people do 3D shaders in Godot right now?
They literally put a quad mesh in front of the camera and give it a shader.
>hey, if it works...
It doesn't. It shows whatever shader you want to use, sure, but it also breaks any sort of transparency in the scene. If you go this route you literally can NOT have transparent objects. They won't appear.
The other way of having shaders is to place the camera as a child of a SubViewport and give that SubViewport a material with a shader in it.
If you look closer my game has a little bit of dithering and color limitation. That's how I did it: a shader in the subviewport.

You want to use Compute shaders? Good luck. They need a @tool script to be running in the editor just to set them up, then another script for doing god knows what, then the actual shader which has to be written in GLSL which Godot's editor does NOT support so you have to write it in another program and import it.
It works, it's there. I just don't know how to use it and can't find fuck all in terms of good guides