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Vertex Shaders in the Pipeline The following diagram shows the Source or Polygon, Vertex and Pixel Operations level of the Direct3D pipeline in a very simplified way: Figure 1 - Direct3D Pipeline On the source data level, the vertices are assembled and tessellated. This is the high-order primitive module, which works to tessellate high-order primitives such as N-Patches (as supported by the ATI RADEON 8500 in hardware), quintic Béziers, B-splines and rectangular and triangular (RT) patches. A GPU that supports RT-Patches breaks higher-order lines and surfaces into triangles and vertices. It appears that, beginning with the 21.81 drivers, NVIDIA no longer supports RT-patches on the GeForce3/4TI. A GPU that supports N-Patches generates the control points of a Bézier triangle for each triangle in the input data. This control mesh is based on the positions and normals of the original triangle. The Bézier surface is then tessellated and evalueaded, creating more triangels on chip [Vlachos01]. The N-Patches functionality was enhanced in Direct3D 8.1. There is more control over the interpolation order of the positions and normals of the generated vertices. The new D3DRS_POSITIONORDER and D3DRS_NORMALORDER render states control this interpolation order. The position interpolation order can be set to either D3DORDER_LINEAR or D3DORDER_CUBIC. The normal interpolation order can be set to either D3DORDER_LINEAR or D3DORDER_QUADRATIC. In Direct3D 8.0, the position interpolation was hard wired to D3DORDER_CUBIC and the normal interpolation was hard wired to D3DORDER_LINEAR. Note: If you use N-Patches together with programmable vertex shaders, you have to store the position and normal information in input registers v0 and v3. That's because the N-Patch Tesselator needs to know where these informations are to notify the driver. The next stage shown in Figure 1 covers the vertex operations in the Direct3D pipeline. There are two different ways of processing vertices. The "fixed-function" pipeline. This is the standard Transform & Lighting (T&L) pipeline, where the functionality is essentially fixed. The T&L pipeline can be controlled by setting render states, matrices, and lighting and material parameters. Vertex Shaders. This is the new mechanism introduced in DirectX 8. Instead of setting parameters to control the pipeline, you write a vertex shader program that executes on the graphics hardware. Our focus is on Vertex Shaders. It is obvious from this simplified diagram in Figure 1 that Face Culling, User Clip Planes, Frustrum Clipping, Homogenous Divide and Viewport Mapping operate on pipeline stages after the vertex shader. Therefore these stages are fixed and can't be controlled by a vertex shader. A vertex shader is also not capable of writing to other vertices than the one it currently shades. It is also not capable of creating vertices; it generates one output vertex from each vertex it receives as input. So what are the capabilities and benefits of using Vertex Shaders? Why use Vertex Shaders? If you use Vertex Shaders, you bypass the fixed-function pipeline or T&L pipeline. Why would you want to skip them? Because the hardware of a traditional T&L pipeline doesn't support all of the popular vertex attribute calculations on its own, processing is often job shared between the geometry engine and the CPU. Sometimes, this leads to redundancy. There is also a lack of freedom. Many of the effects used in games look similar with the hard-wired T&L pipeline. The fixed-function pipeline doesn't give the developer the freedom he need to develop unique and revolutionary graphical effects. The procedural model used with vertex shaders enables a more general syntax for specifying common operations. With the flexibility of the vertex shaders developers are able to perform operations including: Procedural Geometry (cloth simulation, soap bubble [Isidoro/Gosslin]) Advanced Vertex Blending for Skinning and Vertex Morphing (tweening) [Gosselin] Texture Generation [Riddle/Zecha] Advanced Keyframe Interpolation (complex facial expression and speech) Particle System Rendering Real-Time Modifications of the Perspective View (lens effects, underwater effect) Advanced Lighting Models (often in cooperation with the pixel shader) [Bendel] First Steps to Displacement Mapping [Calver] And there are a many more effects possible with vertex shaders, perhaps effects that nobody thought of before. For example a lot of SIGGRAPH papers from the last couple of years describe graphical effects, that are realized only on SGI hardware so far. It might be a great challenge to port these effects with the help of vertex and pixel shaders to consumer hardware. In addition to opening up creative possibilities for developers and artists, shaders also attack the problem of constrained video memory bandwidth by executing on-chip on shader-capable hardware. Take, for example, Bézier patches. Given two floating point values per vertex (plus a fixed number of values per primitive), one can design a vertex shader to generate a position, a normal and a number of texture coordinates. Vertex Shaders even give you the possibility to decompress compressed position, normal, color, matrix and texture coordinate data and to save a lot of valuable bandwith without any additional cost [Calver]. And there is also a benefit for your future learning curve. The procedural programming model used by vertex shaders is very scalable. Therefore the adding of new instructions and new registers will happen in a more intuitive way for developers. Vertex Shader Tools

Contents   Introduction   Vertex Shaders in the Pipeline   Vertex Shader Tools   Vertex Shader Architecture   High Level View of Vertex Shader Programming   Conclusion   Printable version   Discuss this article The Series   Fundamentals of Vertex Shaders   Programming Vertex Shaders   Fundamentals of Pixel Shaders   Programming Pixel Shaders   Diffuse & Specular Lighting with Pixel Shaders