OpenGL® Shading Language, Second Edition

Foreword

To me, graphics shaders are about the coolest things to ever happen in computer graphics. I grew up in graphics in the 1970s, watching the most amazing people do the most amazing things with the mathematics of graphics. I remember Jim Blinn’s bump-mapping technique, for instance, and what effects it was able to create. The method was deceptively simple, but the visual impact was momentous. True, it took a substantial amount of time for a computer to work through the pixel-by-pixel software process to make that resulting image, but we only cared about that a little bit. It was the effect that mattered.

My memory now fast-forwards to the 1980s. Speed became a major issue, with practitioners like Jim Clark working on placing graphics algorithms ...