9 - Rendering pipeline and shaders

Question 1

Shaders

Answer 1

programmable stages of the OpenGL rendering pipeline.

Shaders are small programs compiled at run-time by the OpenGL program, which allows more flexibility in programming rendering steps and using graphics card acceleration.

They are sent to the GPU in parallel and are written in GL Shading Language (GLSL) .

Question 2

Fixed stages:

Answer 2

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Vertex Post-Processing
Primitive Assembly
Rasterization
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Per-Sample Operations

Question 3

Shader stages:

Answer 3

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Vertex
Tessellation
Geometry Shader
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Fragment shader
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Question 4

Vertex Specification

Answer 4

the array of all vertices is defined

Question 5

Vertex shaders

Answer 5

perform basic processing of individual vertices in the scene (e.g. viewport transformation), ), whilst the next three stages perform some additional processing on the scene geometry.

Question 6

Fragment shaders

Answer 6

process the fragments generated by rasterisation

Question 7

Per-sample operations

Answer 7

for example, depth testing (where close/far objects are discarded) or stencil testing (where points outside a certain area are ignored).