I absolutely love shaders, the freedom they give to produce stunningly beautiful effects and characters in real-time is very fascinating for me. I am currently in the pursuit of mastering this incredible technology, I created this page as a way of "venting" my obsession with shader programming :D

This is the Rendering Pipeline for XNA

It shows, you guessed it, how everything is rendered to the monitor, screen. The application data is sent to the vertex buffer for the vertices to be processed, that info is sent to the pixel shader to make those vertices visible on screen. They are also responsible for effects like "depth-of-field","motion blur","bloom", and "glow-effects". All of this information is finally pasted to your monitor at incredibly fast speeds, 60 plus frames per second (fps)!

Also XNA is the engine I am currently learning in, if you are interested, there are many sites that focus on this tool. Google "riemers xna" and you will find a lovely source of informitive tutorials geared toward complete noobs, to savy c#, c++-ers :3

Below is a video of the tech demo for the Unreal Engine 3, it is one of the top engines in the market to date. Most of the visual achieved in the engine are through shaders, or the programmable graphics pipeline, this fuels my obsession even more :D

But seriously this engine is awesome, amazing even, if you haven't already, and why haven't you? Go play Gears of War 2 and you will understand it's brilliance!