Book Image

OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook - Third Edition

By : David Wolff
Book Image

OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook - Third Edition

By: David Wolff

Overview of this book

OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook, Third Edition provides easy-to-follow recipes that first walk you through the theory and background behind each technique, and then proceed to showcase and explain the GLSL and OpenGL code needed to implement them. The book begins by familiarizing you with beginner-level topics such as compiling and linking shader programs, saving and loading shader binaries (including SPIR-V), and using an OpenGL function loader library. We then proceed to cover basic lighting and shading effects. After that, you'll learn to use textures, produce shadows, and use geometry and tessellation shaders. Topics such as particle systems, screen-space ambient occlusion, deferred rendering, depth-based tessellation, and physically based rendering will help you tackle advanced topics. OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook, Third Edition also covers advanced topics such as shadow techniques (including the two of the most common techniques: shadow maps and shadow volumes). You will learn how to use noise in shaders and how to use compute shaders. The book provides examples of modern shading techniques that can be used as a starting point for programmers to expand upon to produce modern, interactive, 3D computer-graphics applications.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Introduction


Compute shaders were introduced into OpenGL with version 4.3. A compute shader is a shader stage that can be used for arbitrary computation. It provides the ability to leverage the GPU and its inherent parallelism for general computing tasks that might have previously been implemented in serial on the CPU. The compute shader is most useful for tasks that are not directly related to rendering, such as physical simulation.

Note

Although APIs such as OpenCL and CUDA are already available for general purpose computation on the GPU, they are completely separate from OpenGL. Compute shaders are integrated directly within OpenGL, and therefore are more suitable for general computing tasks that are more closely related to graphics rendering.

The compute shader is not a traditional shader stage in the same sense as the fragment or vertex shader. It is not executed in response to rendering commands. In fact, when a compute shader is linked with a vertex, fragment, or other shader stages...