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shader

A small program that runs on the GPU to compute part of how a scene is drawn.

Shaders are the programmable stages of the graphics pipeline: vertex shaders position geometry, fragment shaders color pixels, geometry shaders generate extra primitives, and compute shaders do general parallel work. Written in a shading language and compiled to GPU code, they run in massive parallel across many vertices or pixels at once.

See also

  • SPIR-VThe compiled binary format that Vulkan shaders are shipped in, independent of any GPU or source language.
  • SSBOA large GPU buffer that shaders can both read from and write to freely.
  • scanline rasterizerThe engine that turns triangles and shapes into pixels by filling them one horizontal row at a time.

Referenced by

robustBufferAccess · sample-rate / per-sample shading · sampler · scanline · scanline rasterizer · scissor · screen-space derivative · shaderInt32 · shaderInt8/16 · shared memory · shuffle · SPIR-V · sRGB · SSBO