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Modern graphics cards use a freely programmable, shader-controlled pipeline, which allows direct access to individual processing steps. To relieve the main processor, additional processing steps have been moved to the pipeline and the GPU. The most important shader units are vertex shaders, geometry shaders, and pixel shaders.
In the field of 3D computer graphics, Multiple Render Targets, or MRT, is a feature of modern graphics processing units (GPUs) that allows the programmable rendering pipeline to render images to multiple render target textures at once. These textures can then be used as inputs to other shaders or as texture maps applied to 3D models.
Fixed function APIs tend to be a simpler programming abstraction with a series of well-defined and specifically named graphics pipeline stages. Shader-based APIs treat graphics data (vertices and pixels / texels) generically and allow a great deal of flexibility in how this data is modulated.
The OpenGL Architecture Review Board (ARB) was formed in 1992, in part to establish standards for the GPU industry. The ARB and Nvidia established a number of OpenGL extensions to standardize GPU programming: [1] EXT_texture_env_combine - provided a programmable method of combining textures. NV_register_combiners - GeForce 256
OpenGL (Open Graphics Library [4]) is a cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D vector graphics.The API is typically used to interact with a graphics processing unit (GPU), to achieve hardware-accelerated rendering.
OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) is a high-level shading language with a syntax based on the C programming language. It was created by the OpenGL ARB (OpenGL Architecture Review Board) to give developers more direct control of the graphics pipeline without having to use ARB assembly language or hardware-specific languages.
The first video card with a programmable pixel shader was the Nvidia GeForce 3 (NV20), released in 2001. [3] Geometry shaders were introduced with Direct3D 10 and OpenGL 3.2. Eventually, graphics hardware evolved toward a unified shader model .
The graphics rendering pipeline ("rendering pipeline" or simply "pipeline") is the foundation of real-time graphics. [4] Its main function is to render a two-dimensional image in relation to a virtual camera, three-dimensional objects (an object that has width, length, and depth), light sources, lighting models, textures and more.