Contents

Introduction
Vertex Shaders
in the Pipeline
Why use Vertex
Shaders?
Vertex Shader Tools
Vertex Shader
Architecture
High Level View of
Vertex Shader
Programming
Conclusion

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The Series

Fundamentals of
Vertex Shaders

What happens next?

In the next lesson named "Programming Vertex Shaders" we will start writing our first vertex shaders. We will discuss different lighting algorithms and the way to implement them.

Resources

A lot of information on vertex shaders can be found at nVidia and at ATI. Philip Taylor's three articles "Using Vertex Shaders" and his article on using a Screensaver Framework with vertex and pixel shaders can be found at MSN. There is also an interesting article on the Geforce 3 with a good explanation of vertex shaders at Tom's Hardware. Reactorcritical offers a good article on vertex programs using OpenGL, but it is also useful for DirectX Graphics coders. You must read "A User-Programmable Vertex Engine" written by Erik Lindholm, Mark J. Kilgard and Henry Moreton. A diagram on the Direct3D 8.0 pipeline that helps you understanding this pipeline is provided by Rich at www.xmission.com/~legalize/book.