03-04-2018, 01:37 PM
Shaders are very cool and fun to play with, but also a little tricky for beginners to get their heads around.
Fortunately OpenGLES2.0's shaders are very simple, they are 1st generation shader pairs, consisting of a Vertex and Fragment shader pair, called a Program Object, or PO.
The vast majority of the current crop of SBC's use OpenGLES2.0 and with that GLSL 1.0 is the main format. Its a very simple and easy to follow format but do consider that our GPU's are very simple systems, and often only have dual core systems compared to the many hundreds of cores our PC's have.
So while its quite possible to get a high end PC shader to work on something like a Raspberry, its performance will be impacted by the low core count and clock speed of an SBC. This makes shaders quite a challenge to write, they need to be very very efficient, and as simple as possible. Though it is still fun to see a complex shader render scenes that are not possible to use in real time.
Basically though GLSL1.0 is a simple language it can do many many things, just not very fast...limit your expectations, but always push your boundries.
I will post a few shaders here for users and students to make use of, but there is an assumption that you will be aware of how to load and compile and feed your shaders, and have your own shader manager in place.
Anyone who wants to include their own shaders is free to do so.
Fortunately OpenGLES2.0's shaders are very simple, they are 1st generation shader pairs, consisting of a Vertex and Fragment shader pair, called a Program Object, or PO.
The vast majority of the current crop of SBC's use OpenGLES2.0 and with that GLSL 1.0 is the main format. Its a very simple and easy to follow format but do consider that our GPU's are very simple systems, and often only have dual core systems compared to the many hundreds of cores our PC's have.
So while its quite possible to get a high end PC shader to work on something like a Raspberry, its performance will be impacted by the low core count and clock speed of an SBC. This makes shaders quite a challenge to write, they need to be very very efficient, and as simple as possible. Though it is still fun to see a complex shader render scenes that are not possible to use in real time.
Basically though GLSL1.0 is a simple language it can do many many things, just not very fast...limit your expectations, but always push your boundries.
I will post a few shaders here for users and students to make use of, but there is an assumption that you will be aware of how to load and compile and feed your shaders, and have your own shader manager in place.
Anyone who wants to include their own shaders is free to do so.
Brian Beuken
Lecturer in Game Programming at Breda University of Applied Sciences.
Author of The Fundamentals of C/C++ Game Programming: Using Target-based Development on SBC's
Lecturer in Game Programming at Breda University of Applied Sciences.
Author of The Fundamentals of C/C++ Game Programming: Using Target-based Development on SBC's