ARB Assembly Shader Programming (2023)

Introduction The realm of shader programming today is dominated by GLSL, but the road to where we are was long and loopy. Shader programs came about as a natural evolution of texture combination, another form of programmability found as late as the Wii (2006). However, texture combination on OpenGL is inherently more limited, from lack of features that cannot be worked around e.g. texture coordinate displacement, whilst extensions such as NV_texture_shader were never pulled in. At a point, texture combination was left behind. In 2001 EXT_vertex_shader and ATI_fragment_shader were released, allowing the user to insert shader operations one by one with functions such as glShaderOp...EXT and glColorFragmentOp...ATI . Mesa supports the latter, yet not the former — seemingly inconsistent, when you consider the usual stance on such issues. The two had little time in the sun, as the Architecture Review Board slammed down ARB_vertex_program and ARB_fragment_program , sealing the paradigm f ... Read full article.