Submitted by dougvj on Fri, 01/20/2012 - 18:13
During the mid 90s, PCs were starting to become equipted with graphics acceleration cards capable of performing very specific mathematical calculations in order to speed up the more difficult aspects of gaming and other applications. As these evolved over time, they slowly became more and more programmable. DirectX 8 introduced a programmable shader model, a breakthrough in GPU design. ATI later developed a unified shader model for the xbox 360, which soon after appeared in PCs.
