These large, general-purpose shaders handle this challenge by recompiling the same shader with different preprocessor definitions, and the latter method uses brute-force developer power to achieve the same result. They have either created fully featured large, general-purpose shaders that can be used by a wide variety of scene items, which trade off some performance for flexibility, or created individual shaders for each geometry stream, material type, or light type combination needed. To address this challenge, shader developers have often resorted to one of two general approaches. This becomes an even greater challenge because shaders must support a variety of different materials in a rendered scene across various hardware configurations. Rendering systems must deal with significant complexity when they manage shaders, while providing the opportunity to optimize shader code. See Compute Shader Overview for additional information.

To support the compute shader-specific features, several new resource types are now available, such as read/write buffers, textures, and structured buffers. Some features of the graphics shader are supported, but others have been removed so that new compute shader-specific features could be added. A compute shader does not necessarily have a forced 1-1 mapping to either input records (like a vertex shader does) or output records (like the pixel shader does). However, it is not directly connected to other shader stages.Ī compute shader is designed for mass-market applications that perform computations at interactive rates, when the cost of transitioning between the API (and its associated software stack) and a CPU would consume too much overhead.Ī compute shader has its own set of states. It can directly share memory resources with graphics shaders by using the Direct3D device.

A compute shader is integrated into Direct3D and is accessible through a Direct3D device. The compute shader technology is also known as the DirectCompute technology.

The compute shader is similar to the other programmable pipeline shaders (such as vertex, pixel, geometry) in the way that it accesses inputs and outputs.

In other words, compute shaders allow a GPU to be used as a general-purpose parallel processor. The programming guide contains information about how to use the Direct3D 11 programmable pipeline to create realtime 3D graphics for games, and for scientific and desktop applications.Ī compute shader is a programmable shader designed for general-purpose data-parallel processing.

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