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January 11, 2001 Link to this post
Made in the per-pixel Shade
More clarification from Timothy Wilson about some of the technical aspects of graphics rendering:
Pixel Shaders are a little bit of code that runs per-pixel. They combine textures and may compute lighting. Vertex Shaders are a larger bit of code that runs per-vertex. A vertex shader can move vertices, in addition it may 'shade' them. This is not a requirement, as I have written vertex shaders that do no shading at all, but instead let the pixel shaders do the lighting calculation.
Vertex shading is primarily what we have now in current hardware, each vertex is "shaded", and the values are interpolated across the polygon. Also known as Gouraud shading.
Per-Pixel shading just means each pixel is 'shaded' separately, ie the light calculation is computed in one-way-or-another for every pixel.
Just a lot of confusion as to whats-what. Many of the names are similar, and somewhat misnamed even.
In addition, he sent along an example of per-pixel shading, so you can see what he's talking about. Hope you all read this carefully... there'll be a test on Wednesday. (Louis Wu 21:17:34 UTC)
