Lecture 9 Programmable Shaders.ppt

Lecture 9: Programmable Shaders Prof. Hsien-Hsin Sean Lee School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology Why Programmable Shaders Hardwired pipeline Produces limited effects Effects look the same Gamers want unique look-n-feel Multi-texturing somewhat alleviates this, but not enough Less interoperable, less portable Programmable Shaders Vertex Shader Pixel or Fragment Shader Starting from DX 8.0 assembly DX 9.0 added HLSL High Level Shading Language HLSL MS is compatible with Cg Nvidia Evolution of Graphics Processing Units Pre-GPU Video controller Dumb frame buffer First generation GPU PCI bus Raterization done on GPU ATI Rage, Nvidia TNT2, 3dfx Voodoo3 ‘96 Second generation GPU AGP Include TL into GPU Nvidia GeForce 256, ATI Radeon 7500, S3 Savage3D ’98 Third generation GPU Programmable vertex shader Nvidia GeForce3, ATI Radeon 8500, Microsoft Xbox ’01 Fourth generation GPU Both programmability in vertex and fragment shaders Nvidia GeForce FX, ATI Radeon 9700 ’02 Programmable Graphics Pipeline Graphics Programmable Pipeline Shader Languages HLSL most common post-DX 10.0. No assembly shaders allowed in DX 10.0. Other options: Cg compatible with HLSL GLSL Legacy DirectX shaders in assembly Sh OpenVidia U of Toronto Basic Shader Mechanics Data types: Typically floats, and vectors/matrices of floats Fixed size arrays Three types: Per-instance data, e.g. per-vertex position Per-pixel interpolated data, e.g. texture coordinates Per-batch data, e.g. light position Data are tightly bound to the GPU Flow control is very simple: No recursion Fixed size loops for v_2_0 or earlier Simple if-then-else statements allowed in the latest APIs Texkill asm or clip HLSL or discard GLSL or allows you to abort a write to a pixel form of flow control Vertex Shader Transform to clip-space i.e. screen space Inputs: Common inputs: Vertex position x, y, z, w Texture coordinate Constant inputs Can also have fog, color as i