Advanced Shaders
Daniel Ilett · Apress eBooks · 2022
So far, we have primarily discussed vertex and fragment shaders that take meshes, transform their vertices onto the screen, and color the pixels. Most shaders take this form. We’ve already seen the power of these types of shaders and the broad range of capabilities they have, but they are not the only types of shaders. In the shader pipeline, there are two optional stages that we have not yet encountered: the tessellation shader and the geometry shader. On top of that, there are compute shaders, which operate outside the usual mesh shading pipeline and can be used for arbitrary calculations on the GPU. In this chapter, we will explore some of these strange and exotic new types of shaders and add ever-powerful new tools to our box of tricks.