Accelerated Graphics Hardware Shaders

mental ray 3.3 and later support rendering with graphics hardware. To achieve the same results with hardware and software (within the capabilities of the graphics hardware), it is necessary to provide a hardware shader equivalent for each software shader used in the scene.

mental ray will automatically convert graphs of software shaders, and Phenomena in particular, by compiling the existing hardware shader nodes into a program stream accepted by the graphics hardware. This requires that the hardware shaders are written in a language like NVIDIA's Cg 1.2 language that supports the necessary interface definitions.

Shaders written in other languages are accepted as well, but cannot be used as nodes in shader graphs. In these cases it is necessary to write a hardware shader that represents the entire graph or Phenomenon.

For general information on hardware rendering in mental ray 3.3, see page hardware, and the bibliography at the end of this manual. This section describes how to write hardware shaders.

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