The term “shader” was coined by Pixar,
with their RenderMan
software. Initially shaders were
used for offline rendering, e.g., Toy Story.
Late 1990s: PixelFlow and RealTime
Shading language offered software support for real-time shaders.
Consumer-grade graphics cards were
introduced to the marketplace in the mid 1990s; however, they did not support
shaders
until early 2000s.
In 2004, OpenGL 2.0 was released,
including GLSL, a C-style shading language.
These days, dedicated graphics cards will
have hardware support for shaders. Integrated chipsets may support shaders
through software if hardware support is not available.
Programmable
pipelines are now standard in modern
computer
graphics.