Real-time programmable shading
Anselmo Lastra, Steven Molnar, Marc Olano, Yulan Wang · 1995
One of the main techniques used by software renderers to produce stunningly realistic images is programmable shading—executing an arbitrarily complex program to compute the color at each pixel. Thus far, programmable shading has only been available on software rendering systems that run on general-purpose computers. Rendering each image can take from minutes to hours.