Tag: GPU
All the articles with the tag "GPU".
A Height Map Isn't Displacement, It's Parallax
A beginner's explainer clipped after hearing tessellation come up in an interview and going to look up what it was. Pairing tessellation with displacement is exactly what Microsoft's docs do. But the field that looks like that pairing in Unity, the Standard Shader's Height Map, isn't displacement — the docs call it parallax mapping.
What Decides the Matrix for a Normal Isn't the Inverse, It's Where the Vector Sits
Lecture notes on vertex processing, clipped while studying shaders by applying them. I checked three of its rules against the specs — the matrix a normal gets multiplied by, the cross-product order for the three camera axes, and what to change going from right-handed to left-handed. On the normal, the inverse isn't the wrong answer; what's missing is which side the vector sits on.
The Definition Describes a Pixel Shader, Not a Shader
A 2024 write-up on what a shader is. The transcription argument is accurate and even brings sources, but one sentence of the definition conflicts with the structure section two sections later. What's written there is a pixel shader, not a shader.
A Render Pipeline Is an Asset, and Built-In Is What's Left When the Field Is Empty
I read Unity's introduction to render pipelines. I had it filed as picking one of three, but following the docs it turns out Built-In isn't something you pick — it's what remains when you've assigned nothing.