High-Level Shader Language

The High-Level Shader Language or High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) is a proprietary shading language developed by Microsoft for the Direct3D 9 API to augment the shader assembly language, and went on to become the required shading language for the unified shader model of Direct3D 10 and higher. It was developed alongside the Cg (short for C for Graphics) shading language from Nvidia. Early versions of the two languages were considered identical, only marketed differently. Although Cg and HLSL share the same core syntax, some features of C were modified and new data types were added to make Cg/HLSL more suitable for programming graphics processing units. Two main branches of the Cg/HLSL language exist: the Nvidia Cg compiler (cgc) which outputs DirectX or OpenGL and the Microsoft HLSL which outputs DirectX shaders in bytecode format. Nvidia's cgc was deprecated in 2012, with no additional development or support available. HLSL shaders can enable many special effects in both 2D and 3D computer graphics. D3D11.3 and D3D12 introduced Shader Model 5.1 and later 6.0. Due to technical advances in graphics hardware, some areas of 3D graphics programming have become quite complex. To simplify the process, new features were added to graphics cards, including the ability to modify their rendering pipelines using vertex and pixel shaders.