Hughes/Computer Graphics, 3/E

Chapter 33. Shaders

33.1. Introduction

This chapter is about shaders, pieces of code written in a shading language, a specialized language that’s designed to make shader writing easy. Shaders describe how to process data in the graphics pipeline. Shading languages are evolving so fast (as is the programmability of the pipeline itself) that this chapter will be out of date before its last sentence is written, let alone before you read it. Despite this rapid evolution, there are some things that are invariant across several generations of shading languages, and that we anticipate will remain in future versions for at least a decade. There’s some reason to believe this. The evolution of the graphics libraries that link a program on a CPU to one ...