The concept has been universal since then.Įarly shader abstractions (such as Shader Model 1.x) used very different instruction sets for vertex and pixel shaders, with vertex shaders having much more flexible instruction set. AMD introduced a unified shader in card form two years later in the TeraScale line. Nvidia quickly followed with their Tesla design. ATI Technologies introduced a unified architecture on the hardware they developed for the Xbox 360. As improvements in fabrication continued, this distinction became less useful.
This was at the cost of making the system less flexible, and sometimes leaving one set of shaders idle if the workload used one more than the other. This lowered the cost of implementation of the GPU as a whole, and allowed more shaders in total on a single unit. History Įarlier GPUs generally included two types of shader hardware, with the vertex shaders having considerably more instructions than the simpler pixel shaders. They can all read textures and buffers, and they use instruction sets that are almost identical. In the field of 3D computer graphics, the unified shader model (known in Direct3D 10 as ' Shader Model 4.0') refers to a form of shader hardware in a graphical processing unit (GPU) where all of the shader stages in the rendering pipeline (geometry, vertex, pixel, etc.) have the same capabilities. The unified shader model uses the same hardware resources for both vertex and fragment processing.
