The Lowdown on Shaders and Free E-Books!

When you read about GPUs (Graphic Processing Units), you'll see plenty about shaders but what exactly is a shader? Well it depends upon the type of shader- ie vertex shaders that help render 3D images intp 2D space with appropriate color and position adjustments, geometry shaders that add vertices (basically where edges meet) to the 3D structure and pixel shaders that calculate the color of pixels to affect lighting etc. A shader is a combination of code and data that is processed in hardware using multi-core GPUs. These consume 350-450W of power in the case of Nvidia Geforce 8 where the shaders are combined in a unified shader. These newer GPUs add effects such as smoke, fire, explosions etc.

The book cover shown is one of three in the ShaderX series published from 2002 on that covers Shader programming in detail. Edited by Wolfgang Engel, the first three books in the series (Now up to ShaderX⁷) are provided as free books in PDF format. These aren't for the absolute beginner but if you want to know what it's all about these are excellent and include source code.

• Link to Free E-Books