Shading Language - Real-time Rendering

Real-time Rendering

Shading languages for real-time rendering are now widespread. They provide both higher hardware abstraction and a more flexible programming model than previous paradigms which hardcoded transformation and shading equations. This gives the programmer greater control over the rendering process and delivers richer content at lower overhead.

Quite surprisingly, shaders that are designed to be executed directly on the GPU at the proper point in the pipeline for maximum performance, also scored successes in general processing because of their stream programming model.

This kind of shading language is usually bound to a graphics API, although some applications provide shading sublanguages.

Historically, only few such languages were successful in both establishing themselves and maintaining strong market position; a short description of those languages follows below.