IDLgrShader

A shader object provides access to the hardware-based processing power available on some modern graphics cards. This allows computationally intensive image processing operations to be delegated to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) of a suitable graphics card, dramatically increasing performance and interactivity. A shader program can perform image filtering operations, complex lighting and shading calculations, interactive blending of multiple textures, animation of object vertices, or any combination of these.

See "Hardware Requirements for Shaders" (Object Programming) for information on graphics cards and how to determine whether the graphics card supports this shader functionality. If there is not sufficient support for the shader program, IDL draws the scene graph as if there was no shader object present.

Note
See Advanced Rendering Using Shader Objects (Object Programming) for valuable overview information about using shader programs with IDL and for a wide range of examples.

Warning
Setting IDLgrImage RENDER_METHOD=1 (do not render image as texture-mapped polygon) disables all shader functionality including the software-based alternative.