Cg in Two Pages

The latest real-time graphics architectures include programmable floating-point vertex and fragment processors, with support for data-dependent control flow in the vertex processor. We present a programming language and a supporting system that are designed for programming these stream processors. The language follows the philosophy of C, in that it is a hardware-oriented, generalpurpose language, rather than an application-specific shading language. The language includes a variety of facilities designed to support the key architectural features of programmable graphics processors, and is designed to support multiple generations of graphics architectures with different levels of functionality. The system supports both of the major 3D graphics APIs: OpenGL and Direct3D. This paper identifies many of the choices that we faced as we designed the system, and explains why we made the decisions that we did. CR Categories: I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism—Color, shading, shadowing, and texture; D.3.4 [Programming Languages]: Processors – Compilers and code generation I.3.1 [Computer Graphics]: Hardware Architecture— Graphics processors; I.3.6 [Computer Graphics]: Methodology and Techniques—Languages