In this article, I’ll show you how to use the ARB_fragment_program extension.

There are some different shader extensions for OpenGL. Loading Pixel Shaders in OpenGLīefore we get begin writing shaders, we should have a way to load them and use them. If you haven’t yet, you may want to download the NVIDIA Cg Toolkit, which contains the NVIDIA Cg Compiler and some good documentation. It’s important to note, however, that not all low-level languages have the same feature sets, and some Cg programs that can be compiled into newer low-level languages may not compile into older low-level languages. Cg allows you you to write one shader and use it with practically any API and GPU the Cg compiler from NVIDIA can generate output in many of the low-level shader languages, including OpenGL’s ARB_fragment_program language that’s used for this article. There are many different low-level (assembly-like) shader languages that different APIs (such as OpenGL and Direct3D), and even different GPUs, may support. As its name implies, its syntax and semantics are very similar to those of the C programming language. CgĬg (“C for graphics”) is a high-level shader programming language developed by NVIDIA. Mesa, a software-based OpenGL-compatible graphics library, also supports shaders you may want to check that out if you have an older graphics card that doesn’t have shader support, but it will obviously run very slow compared to a hardware implementation. Most modern GPUs, particularly ones made by NVIDIA and ATI, support vertex and pixel shaders. The powerful flexibility enabled by shaders is probably the biggest advance in real-time graphics programming in the past several years. Pixel Shaders (also sometimes called Fragment Shaders or Fragment Programs) are executed on each pixel that’s rendered. Vertex Shaders (also sometimes called Vertex Programs) are executed on each vertex that’s processed by the graphics API.

Simply put, shaders are small programs that are executed on a per-vertex or per-pixel basis. It contains sample C and Cg code and is accompanied by a simple diffuse lighting demo with full source code.

This article provides an introduction to writing pixel shaders with the Cg shader programming language and using them in OpenGL with the ARB_fragment_program extension. Tutorial - Cg Pixel Shaders in OpenGL - Josh Beam's Website Josh Beam's Website Articles Software GitHub Email Tutorial - Cg Pixel Shaders in OpenGL

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