Unlike the other Shaders, Compute Shaders don’t output anything visual. These Shaders are a recent innovation – indeed, older video hardware may not even support them.Īs with Fragment and Vertex Shaders, a Compute Shader is a short program that the graphics card runs in a massively-parallel fashion. You can achieve some interesting visual effects by manipulating the data output by Vertex Shaders, but you won’t cover that in this tutorial.Ĭompute Shaders don’t actually render anything, but are simply programs that run on video hardware. While the input data is in three dimensions, the computer needs to determine where the vertices appear in two dimensions before it can render the pixels. There are also Vertex Shaders, which you use to compute the position of vertices in the image. Indeed, being able to process more pixels simultaneously is a major part of how video cards accelerate graphics. The program runs over and over, mostly in parallel, to generate all the pixels of all the polygons processed by that Shader. Another common term is Fragment Shader, since each pixel is a fragment of the full image.įragment Shaders output a single pixel’s color, which it calculates based on that pixel’s position on a polygon. The main type is a Pixel Shader, named for the obvious reason that it outputs a pixel. Rather, there are different types of Shaders that do different things. Technically, an individual Shader doesn’t output an entire image, nor do they always do rendering. as the input and generates an image as the output. That is, a Shader is a program that takes meshes, textures etc. Rendering is what programmers call the process of generating an image, and Shaders are short programs that render graphics data. That information passes to the graphics hardware, which then processes the image and displays it onto the screen. What Are Shaders?Ĭomputer graphics, especially 3D graphics, use many different kinds of information to construct the visuals: meshes, textures, lights and so on. If you’re new to Unity, start with our Introduction to Unity: Getting Started tutorial. Note: This is an intermediate-level tutorial, which assumes you already know the basics of how to operate Unity.

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