Reading this article <
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/25-years-ago-today-microsoft-released-directx-8-and-changed-pc-graphics-forever-how-programmable-shaders-laid-the-groundwork-for-the-future-of-modern-gpu-rendering>
about how DirectX 8 made a big advance in PC gaming by introducing
programmable shaders. This was in November 2000.
I thought, ?surely OpenGL must have been in that game as well?. But,
looking back at older OpenGL specs, the earliest mention of vertex
shaders and fragment shaders I can find is in an appendix to the
OpenGL 1.5 spec from October 2003, where they are still classed as ARB extensions, rather than a core part of the spec. I think they only
became part of core OpenGL with version 2.0 from a year later.
I suppose you could say this was still the point where the OpenGL
community was dominated by vendors doing things like CAD and
scientific visualization work. It took that three-year gap for them to (grudgingly) come to see video gaming as a serious, worthwhile
application for OpenGL.
Of course the concept of programmable shaders is much older than that,
being an important part of RenderMan from, when was it, as far back as
the late 1980s, or maybe later. But that was a non-real-time renderer
for producing high-quality graphics for movies and the like, not video
gaming.
So, was Microsoft the first to introduce programmable shaders into
real-time graphics? (In association with actual hardware implementing
it, like the NVidia GeForce 3, of course.) Seems like it.
--- PyGate Linux v1.5
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)