These shaders are programmable, so games developers can make their own, allowing them to create a unique look and feel for their game. These shaders are the key to what makes the graphics in games today look so much better than the graphics in games from 3, 4 or 5 years ago. These programmes add effects to basic geometry - so a water-styled shader can be added to a flat blue texture to make it look reflective, or a glass-styled shader can be added to a polygon to make it appear transparent. Consequently, there are two major types of shader - pixel shaders and vertex shaders. What are shaders?Shaders are small programmes that alter pixels or vertices. The current Radeon line is the X800, which also supports DirectX 9.0c but only Shader Model 2.0b. So we come to today, where we have the GeForce 6 and 7 series, which support DirectX 9.0c and Shader Model 3.0. Both these cards supported DX9 and Shader model 2.0, with NVIDIA also supporting the 2.0a revision for a few extra features (although it was dog-slow). NVIDIA then introduced the GeForceFX, which was a DirectX 9.0 part, and ATI the 9700. The 8500 was slightly later to market, and supported Shader Model 1.4, which had been implemented with the revision of DirectX to version 8.1.
The GeForce 3 was concurrent with the Radeon 8500.
This breakthrough came as DirectX 8 introduced the first widely-used iteration of shaders, Model 1.1. The GeForce 3, then, was the first programmable GPU, allowing game developers to do whatever they wanted with the card. The technology was concurrent with Direct X 7. However, the card was still fixed function - programmers had to write routines which could execute using routines built into the card. The GeForce 2 card was a faster version of the 256. Following this, the GeForce 256 GPU was the very first card to fully accelerate a whole scene from start to finish, using hardware-based transform and lighting. This accelerated just pixel processing and rasterisation. Some historyHow about a quick history lesson then? 3D accelerated graphics were first introduced in 1997, with the first 3Dfx Voodoo card. No, not Kate Moss or Naomi Campbell - shader models, Microsoft standards that define the capabilities of graphics platforms. Today, we're going to be getting down and dirty with shader models.
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