Microsoft releases open-source DirectX Shader Compiler
by from Techreport on (#2A6V5)
At GDC last year, Microsoft pulled back the curtain on the graphics technologies coming with Shader Model 6.0. As it turns out, the company still had some surprises up its sleeve. Microsoft has released the DirectX Shader Compiler as an open-source project, built on the popular Clang/LLVM toolchain.
Broadly speaking, shaders are programs that modify colors and shapes to add effects to rendered images or polygon meshes. Modern games employ a large number of shaders, and they're often targeted for optimization in graphics driver releases. HLSL is a shader language ...