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11-26-2002, 01:46 AM
http://www.cgshaders.org/articles/interview_davidkirk02.php
Q: Why didn't you just pick RenderMan? Or the Stanford Shading System? Why reinvent the wheel?
A: Though our main goal was to create a powerful, flexible and expressive high level language for programming GPUs, we also knew that we needed a language that could be easily adopted by developers and integrated into existing applications. Cg can be compiled offline to assembly shaders which, in turn, can be simply "dropped into" existing applications already supporting vertex/pixel shaders. Furthermore, Cg does not burden or restrict the application developer with any sort of complicated resource or scene graph management. As such, a game can incorporate Cg with little to no changes to its core rendering infrastructure. That said, the designers of the language took many lessons from the Stanford Shading Language and RenderMan and applied them when creating Cg.
Q: Why didn't you just pick RenderMan? Or the Stanford Shading System? Why reinvent the wheel?
A: Though our main goal was to create a powerful, flexible and expressive high level language for programming GPUs, we also knew that we needed a language that could be easily adopted by developers and integrated into existing applications. Cg can be compiled offline to assembly shaders which, in turn, can be simply "dropped into" existing applications already supporting vertex/pixel shaders. Furthermore, Cg does not burden or restrict the application developer with any sort of complicated resource or scene graph management. As such, a game can incorporate Cg with little to no changes to its core rendering infrastructure. That said, the designers of the language took many lessons from the Stanford Shading Language and RenderMan and applied them when creating Cg.