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Cg Background"Cg is a language for programming GPUs. Cg programs look a lot like C programs." [4] The GPU stands for Graphics Processing Unit: it is a specialized integrated circuit that can perform complex graphics computations. The two GPU operations that can be programmed via Cg are: vertex operations and fragment operations. A Cg vertex program can perform certain computations on the GPU for every vertex defined in a mesh. A Cg fragment program can perform certain computations on the GPU for every fragment (pixel or point on the screen) in a mesh. Cg provides a number of graphics-specific primitives (such as vector dot- and cross- products, matrix multiplications, etc.) Any Cg program expects certain parameters as input and is required to produce certain parameters as output. For example, a Cg vertex program probably needs the position of the current vertex and some matrix as input and is required to produce the modified position of the current vertex as output. Similarly, a Cg fragment program probably needs the position of the current fragment and some color and/or texture parameters as input and is required to produce the color of the current fragment as output. The parameters for a Cg program are of two types: varying and uniform. Varying parameters, as the name implies, vary for every graphics element drawn on the screen (for example, the vertex position is a varying parameter to a vertex program). Uniform parameters are the same for the current batch of graphics elements (for example, the ambient light color is a uniform parameter to a fragment program). The vertex program always runs before the fragment program, and the output from the former can be fed directly into the latter. Cg programs are "compiled" into "assembly" code that is specific to the targeted GPU and the associated software driver. For example, a vertex program written in Cg can be compiled and targeted to the DirectX profile or to the nVIDIA (proprietary) OpenGL extensions. The Cg runtime can be instructed to silently select the most appropriate compiler target for the current platform. A (syntactically and semantically) valid Cg program may fail to compile due to hardware limitations. For example, the program may require more registers (or combiner stages) than are available on the GPU. In this case, you would need to modify the program, remove features from it, or buy better hardware. For further information about the Cg language and supporting API, refer to the official nVIDIA documentation [3].
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