I’ve been out of shader land for more than a year now. And it’s time to jump back into the realm of shaders. Last time I was here, there were two camps: [HLSL] and [Cg] shaders. HLSL are windows specific and Cg are platform independent. The syntax for each is similar. Nvidia provides [FX Composer] that facilitates rapid shader prototyping and does shader profiling. AMD provides [GPU Shader Analyzer] another shader profiling tool. Shader engineers can be found in either the [AMD] or [NVIDIA] or [Mental Mill] or [ShaderFX] developer forums. RenderMonkey can also show [disassembly], but it’s hidden.