What are shaders?

Last edited 2026-02-21

Shaders specialized programs that run on a computer’s Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to determine the final appearance of pixels, vertices, and textures in 2D images and 3D scenes.

Shaders can perform a variety of operations and run on different types of hardware.

In modern real-time computer graphics, shaders run on graphics processing units (GPUs), which are dedicated hardware that provides highly parallel execution of programs.

Because image rendering is highly parallel, fragment and pixel shaders scale well on SIMD hardware.

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