The shader environment
Other applications that you might have coded in the past are built to run inside a CPU. This means that you have used a compiler that took your program (programmed in your favorite high-level programming language) and compiled it down into a representation that a CPU could understand. It does not matter if the programming language is compiled or interpreted, because in the end, all programs are translated to something the CPU can deal with.
Shaders are a little different because they are meant only for graphics, so they are closely related to the following two points:
- First, they need a graphics card, because inside the graphics card lies the processor that will run them. This special kind of processor is called the GPU (Graphics ...
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