Cg

TLDR

Recent real‑time graphics architectures feature programmable floating‑point vertex and fragment processors with data‑dependent control flow, and the proposed language adopts a hardware‑oriented, general‑purpose C‑like philosophy rather than an application‑specific shading language. The paper presents a programming language and supporting system for programming stream processors and explains the design choices and rationale behind it. The language provides facilities for key architectural features of programmable graphics processors and supports multiple generations of graphics architectures, while the system integrates with both OpenGL and Direct3D APIs. The paper documents the design decisions made for the system and explains the rationale behind them.

Abstract

The latest real-time graphics architectures include programmable floating-point vertex and fragment processors, with support for data-dependent control flow in the vertex processor. We present a programming language and a supporting system that are designed for programming these stream processors. The language follows the philosophy of C, in that it is a hardware-oriented, general-purpose language, rather than an application-specific shading language. The language includes a variety of facilities designed to support the key architectural features of programmable graphics processors, and is designed to support multiple generations of graphics architectures with different levels of functionality. The system supports both of the major 3D graphics APIs: OpenGL and Direct3D. This paper identifies many of the choices that we faced as we designed the system, and explains why we made the decisions that we did.