Evolution of vertex and pixel shaders

Abstract. In real-time rendering, objects are represented using poly-gons or triangles. Triangles are easy to render and graphics hardware is highly optimized for rendering of triangles. Initially, the shading com-putations were carried out by dedicated hardwired algorithms for each vertex and then interpolated by the rasterizer. Todays graphics hard-ware contains vertex and pixel shaders which can be reprogrammed by the user. Vertex and pixel shaders allow almost arbitrary computations per vertex respectively per pixel. We have developed a system to evolve such programs. The system runs on a variety of graphics hardware due to the use of NVIDIA's high level Cg shader language. Fitness of the shaders is determined by user interaction. Both xed length and vari-able length genomes are supported. The system is highly customizable. Each individual consists of a series of meta commands. The resulting Cg program is translated into the low level commands which are required for the particular graphics hardware.