Vertex shader

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Vertex shader (abbreviation VS) is a shader program, normally executed on the Graphics processing unit.

Function

A vertex shader is a graphics processing function used to add special effects to objects in a 3D environment.

Vertex shaders are run once for each vertex given to the graphics processor. The purpose is to transform each vertex's 3D position in virtual space to the 2D coordinate at which it appears on the screen (as well as a depth value for the Z-buffer). Vertex shaders can manipulate properties such as position, color, and texture coordinate, but cannot create new vertices. The output of the vertex shader goes to the next stage in the pipeline, which is either a geometry shader if present or the rasterizer otherwise.

Programming

Vertex shaders are programmed in the following languages: Assembly, Cg, GLSL, HLSL.

See also

• Geometry shader
• Pixel shader
• Graphics pipeline
• Direct3D
• OpenGL

References

• Toymaker - Vertex Shaders. Three vertex shader example codes
• GameDev - Terrain Geomorphing in the Vertex Shader

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