Treffer: The OpenGL Shading Language

The introduction of programmable graphics hardware opened a door to a new era of real-time rendering. The manifold uses of vertex and fragment shaders enable developers and art-ists to achieve many visuals effects at high frame rates on consumer level hardware, which has been formerly rendered offline. The increasing effort of writing efficient and effective shaders leads to the creation and establishment of new higher-level languages which can be compared to already existing general-purpose languages such as C or Java. One of these shading languages, the OpenGL Shading Language (known as GLSL), will be discussed and examined in depth. I de-scribe its conceptual design, explain how key decisions were resolved and present a working im-plementation. Moreover, I assess the current situation and what particular extensions or improve-ments can be expected in the near future. These conclusions will be matched up to concurrently evolving languages like NVIDIA’s Cg or Microsoft’s High Level Shading Language (HLSL) in order to identify cross-pollinations. A 3D chess game written using GLSL demonstrates a real-life application of modern vertex and fragment shader programming.