What happened next was very exciting. Driven mainly by the popularity of computer games, an entire industry sprung up around the challenge of making inexpensive graphics chips that could quickly perform the massive numbers of matrix and vector operations needed for shader programs.
By the late 1990s there were many such companies, but most of them failed, due to bad quality control. If you get too ambitious and ship even one generation of graphics chips that don’t work properly, your company goes out of business.
The one company that stuck around — mainly because it was more sensible and cautious in releasing new features — was Nvidia. As other companies fell by the wayside, Nvidia quickly cornered much of the market for providing hardware that could do fast 3D rendering for computer games.
As the years went on, and graphics chips became ever faster and more capable, real time shaders grew progressively more sophisticated, and computer games continued to gain ever new levels of visual realism. The principles that I had introduced in that first shader language were still being applied, but now with enormous speed and power.
But the most interesting part hadn’t even happened yet. More tomorrow.