Practical Rendering and Computation with Direct3D 11

6 High Level Shading Language

6.1 Introduction

The core of the Direct3D 11 pipeline is its various programmable shader stages. These stages are where the vast majority of rendering tasks occur, and are also the means by which a GPU’s power and flexibility are made available to the user. While various API functions can manipulate the state in which a shader program will be executed, the actual authoring of shader functionality and behavior is not done with these APIs. Instead, shader programs (also referred to as simply shaders) are authored, using a specially designed programming language known as High Level Shading Language.

High Level Shading Language (commonly abbreviated as HLSL), is primarily a C/ C++-derived language with a simplified feature ...