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Programming Languages White Papers

Radeon X1800 Shader Architecture

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programming languages

Overview The software engines that drive today's latest games and other 3D applications are built around the concept of shaders. A shader is a piece of code that runs on a GPU, and controls how polygons and pixels are rendered. The programmability that shaders provide allows developers to create a practically infinite range of visual effects. The steadily increasing importance of shaders has led to them becoming one of the key performance bottlenecks in graphically intensive applications. Complex shaders with more instructions and more inputs translate into more realistic and interesting effects. However, they also place much heavier processing demands on the GPU, and can become more difficult to program, debug, and optimize.

Further White Paper Details
Publisher	Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)	File Format	PDF
Date Published	September 2005
Format	White Papers
Topics	Programming Languages, 3D Modeling and Rendering, Application Development

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