Check it out: Today
NVIDIA announced their new high-level shader programming language, called
Cg. Think of it as RenderMan for real-time graphics: They have a compiler
that turns high-level C-style code (Cg) into vertex and
pixel shader instructions, for both DirectX and OpenGL. It looks like the
compiler only works for NVIDIA cards for now, but other vendors (ATI?) will
be able to make their own implementations.
There are ongoing
discussions about similar high-level shader languages for all of the major APIs,
including DirectX and OpenGL. A future version of Java 3D is intended
to have high-level shader programming as well. Let's just hope this
doesn't turn into another mess of competing standards...
- Mauricio
