What is HLSL?
High-Level Shader Language
It is a programming language used to calculate visual effects such as lighting and shadows in games.
Overview
It is a language that contains commands determining the color and light of each pixel on the screen. By utilizing the power of the graphics card, it calculates reflections, shadows, and texture effects in the game world in real-time.
How it works
Developers send the code they write in this language to the graphics card; the graphics card then uses this code to calculate and render scenes to the screen dozens of times per second.
Where it is used
It is used in game engines (DirectX-based) and graphics applications.
Commonly confused with
It is often confused with general-purpose programming languages; HLSL is specialized only for graphics calculations (shaders).
Frequently asked questions
Is it hard to learn HLSL?
If you are familiar with graphics mathematics and graphics card architecture, its basic logic is similar to C-style languages.
Related terms
Related tools
This explanation was written in plain language for TreScout and machine-translated from the Turkish original · the Turkish version prevails. If something looks wrong or missing, write to hello@trescout.com. Read in Turkish →