A small program that can be installed on and runs on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to calculate and define the visual appearance of 2D or 3D graphics in a computer system. Shaders are a crucial component of the graphics pipeline and play a key role in determining the final image that is displayed on the screen.
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Vertex Shader: A vertex shader is responsible for transforming 3D vertices into screen space. It takes the vertex data as input, applies transformations, and outputs the transformed vertex.
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Fragment Shader (also known as Pixel Shader): A fragment shader is responsible for calculating the final color of a pixel. It takes the output from the vertex shader as input and outputs the final color of the pixel.
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Vertex and fragment operation specified in small (macro) Assembly language.
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User-specified mapping of input data to operations.
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Limited ability to use intermediated computed values to index input data.
Registers