21.1. Chronology of Shading Languages

Rob Cook and Ken Perlin are usually credited with being the first to develop languages to describe shading calculations. Both of these efforts targeted offline (noninteractive) rendering systems. Perlin's work included the definition of the noise function and the introduction of control constructs. Cook's work on shade trees at Lucasfilm (later Pixar) introduced the classification of shaders as surface shaders, light shaders, atmosphere shaders, and so on, and the ability to describe the operation of each through an expression. This work evolved into the effort to develop a full-featured language for describing shading calculations, which was taken up by Pat Hanrahan and culminated in the 1988 release of the first version of the RenderMan Interface Specification by Pixar. Subsequently, RenderMan became the de facto industry-standard shading language for offline rendering systems for the entertainment industry. It remains in widespread use today.

The first interactive shading language was demonstrated at the University of North Carolina on a massively parallel graphics architecture called PixelFlow that was developed over the decade of the 1990s. The shading language used on PixelFlow could render scenes with procedural shading at 30 frames per second or more. The shading language component of this system was described by Marc Olano in 1998.

After leaving UNC, Olano joined a team at SGI that was defining and implementing an interactive shading language that would run on top of OpenGL and use multipass rendering methods to execute the shaders. This work culminated in the release in 2000 of a product from SGI called OpenGL Shader, the first commercially available real-time, high-level shading language.

In June 1999, the Computer Graphics Laboratory at Stanford embarked on an effort to define a real-time shading language that could be accelerated by existing consumer graphics hardware. This language was called the Stanford Real-Time Shading Language. Results of this system were demonstrated in 2001.

The OpenGL Shading Language, Microsoft's HLSL, and NVIDIA's Cg are all efforts to define a commercially viable, real-time, high-level shading language. The white paper that first described the shading language that would become the OpenGL Shading Language was published in October 2001 by Dave Baldwin of 3Dlabs. NVIDIA's Cg specification was published in June of 2002, and Microsoft's HLSL specification was published in November 2002, as part of the beta release of the DirectX 9.0 Software Development Kit. Some cross-pollination of ideas occurred among these three efforts because of the interrelationships of the companies involved.

In subsequent sections, we compare the OpenGL Shading Language with other commercially available high-level shading languages.