2. Shaders

• Hundreds (or thousands) of GPUs are available to execute...

  • shaders -- GPU programs to manipulate vertices and pixel colors

• Shaders are programs with C-like syntax

• Shaders must be compiled and linked from plain text source code at runtime

• We need at least two shaders:

  • Vertex shader -- handles vertex transformations and lighting calculations

  • Fragment shader -- handles per-pixel operations, e.g. determine lighting/color