21.5. Cg

Cg is a high-level shading language that is similar to HLSL. Cg has been defined, implemented, and supported by NVIDIA. Comparing Cg to the OpenGL Shading Language is virtually the same as comparing HLSL to the OpenGL Shading Language. There are a few minor differences between Cg and HLSL (for instance, HLSL has a double data type but Cg does not), but Cg and HLSL were developed by Microsoft and NVIDIA working together, so their resulting products are very similar.

One advantage that Cg has over both HLSL and the OpenGL Shading Language is that the Cg translator can generate either DirectX vertex shader/pixel shader assembly code or OpenGL vertex/fragment program (assembly-level) code. This provides the potential for using Cg shaders in either the DirectX environment or the OpenGL environment (see Figure 21.4). However, it also requires the application to make calls to a library provided by NVIDIA that sits between the application and the underlying graphics API (either OpenGL or DirectX). This library is called the Cg Runtime library. For simple applications, it can be a help in covering up the limitations of the underlying driver (for instance, it can cover up the fact that a DirectX driver supports multiple versions of vertex and pixel shaders and automatically selects the most appropriate version to use). But this intervening layer can also complicate things for more complicated applications because it covers up details of shader management.

NVIDIA has its own version of the framework that surrounds the shading language. CgFX is a shader specification and interchange format whose file format is the same as that supported by the .fx Effect format for DirectX 9. The CgFX runtime library, like the Cg runtime library, supports both OpenGL and DirectX, so in this way the Microsoft and NVIDIA products differ.

Because it is so similar to HLSL, the advantages and disadvantages of Cg with respect to the OpenGL Shading Language are also similar: proprietary versus standard (thus earlier to market), support for less capable hardware at the cost of hardware dependencies in shader source code, translation from high-level shading language to "standard" assembly interface offline versus a compiler embedded in the driver, a more complete shader development system but with the requirement of extra runtime libraries, and so on.