The flashpoint came in the summer of 2002. A young, fiery developer from ATI (who would later become a legend in the field) released a white paper showing a stunning ocean scene. It was rendered in real-time, with waves that refracted light based on their height and angle. The demo was written in DirectX 9’s HLSL. The footnote was a dagger: "Impossible to achieve efficiently in OpenGL 1.4."
High-level, C-like language for creating custom graphics effects on the GPU. opengl 20
The fixed functions glTranslatef , glRotatef , and glBegin() still work in OpenGL 2.0 (not removed until OpenGL 3.1), but mixing shaders with fixed pipeline is unstable. True 2.0 programming means saying goodbye to the immediate mode you learned in 1990s tutorials. The flashpoint came in the summer of 2002
This allowed a single shader to output data to several buffers at once. This was the foundation for "Deferred Shading," a technique used by almost every modern AAA game engine to handle hundreds of light sources efficiently. The demo was written in DirectX 9’s HLSL