Shaders - 05. CG, HLSL, GLSL

If you've played computer games, you've probably heard the name Direct X at least once.

As mentioned earlier, graphics drawn by a computer don't appear instantly — they go through multiple stages.

This is what graphics APIs handle.

The term "graphics API" might sound grand and impressive, but you can think of it as a collection of code — a bundle of functions needed to orchestrate the drawing process.

Among these, HLSL is the shader language used by Direct3D, an API specialized for drawing.

Similarly, OpenGL (which serves a comparable role to Direct3D) uses GLSL.

There's also CG, jointly developed by Nvidia and Microsoft.

These are all shader languages with similar syntax.

So once you learn one, adapting to the others should be quick.

Since the syntax itself is similar to C, if you know any C-family language, you should be able to pick it up without much difficulty.

Of course, since I've only read HLSL tutorials while writing this, my claim lacks some authority.

But looking at rough examples, I can generally get the gist — so the syntax does seem similar.