– What Are Shaders?

Question

In the context of videogame development what are shaders? I just can’t wrap my head around the concept.

In: Technology

Answer 1

Before the early 2000’s graphics hardware was mostly fixed function. It was not programmable. You gave the GPU drawing commands containing geometry, textures, texture coordinates, etc and it did the work of rendering them to the screen.

In the early 2000’s GPUs became more programmable. This is when we started to see more real-time lighting and shadows. The little programs are called shaders. Using shaders the programmer decides how things are rendered to the screen.