ABSTRACT
As shader capabilities in graphics have improved, shader languages have been developed to give the graphics programmer access to these capabilities. The GLSL shading language was designed to be device independent and to be part of the OpenGL 2.0 standard. It accomplishes its device independence by having compilers built into the graphics card driver translate the GLSL code into the specifi c device instructions for that card. The actual process of att aching shaders to shader programs, compiling them, and linking them to be downloaded into the graphics card is part of the GLSL API that is covered in a later chapter.
