GPU Gems: Programming Techniques, Tips and Tricks for Real-Time Graphics

Chapter 36. Integrating Shaders into Applications

John O’Rorke Monolith Productions

Introduction

This chapter addresses the issues associated with adding support for shaders into an application to improve its flexibility and ease its maintenance. This chapter does not cover individual APIs for dealing with shaders or shader languages. Instead, it takes a high-level view of the communication layer needed between the application and the shader to create a flexible and powerful, data-driven renderer. The motivation for this chapter is simple: When designing a shader-driven renderer, I found plenty of documentation for authoring shaders and for using the associated APIs. But nothing discussed what an application needs to provide to enable robust handling ...