alt Hacker NewsThere are tons of places within the GPU where dedicated fixed function hardware provides massive speedups within the relevant pipelines (rasterization, raytracing). The different shader types are designed to fit inbetween those stages. Abandoning this hardware would lead to a massive performance regression.
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Offtop, but sorry, I can't resist. "Inbetween" is not a word. I started seeing many people having trouble with prepositions lately, for some unknown reason.
> “Inbetween” is never written as one word. If you have seen it written in this way before, it is a simple typo or misspelling. You should not use it in this way because it is not grammatically correct as the noun phrase or the adjective form. https://grammarhow.com/in-between-in-between-or-inbetween/
Just consider the sheer number of computations offloaded to TMUs. Shaders would already do nothing but interpolate texels if you removed them.