Types of shaders

Vertex and fragment shaders are the most important shaders in the whole pipeline, because they expose the pure basic functionality of the GPU. With vertex shaders, you can compute the geometry of the object that you are going to render as well as other important elements, such as the scene's camera, the projection, or how the geometry is clipped. With fragment shaders, you can control how your geometry will look onscreen: colors, lighting, textures, and so on.

As you can see, with only vertex and fragment shaders, you can control almost everything in your rendering process, but there is room for more improvement in the OpenGL machine.

Let's put an example: suppose that you process point primitives with a complex vertex shader. Using ...

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