shaders

Pixar recommends writing shaders in C++ now instead of in RSL, as C++ shaders are just way more performant right now.

The result is tha the API is pretty much concerted with shipping textures and data streams for the GPU, and managing the shaders to operate on them.

It seems it uses advanced geometric shaders to render all the tiny Lego parts on the fly.

You know: That complex hyper-realistic look with lots of fancy shaders to show off the latest hardware.

For the final project we had demos with pretty much everything covered there + post process shaders + deferred lighting + DX11 tessalation shaders + ambient occlusion.

People wrote so many shaders in RSL, most available for you to copy, modify and re-use.

Not even for all of the available shaders, books, tutorials and other resources made available for it over the years?

On the other hand, shaders are now a mandatory part of the rendering pipeline, so you need to learn those.

GPU's are processing an order (or several) of magnitude more data, which makes shaders a useful feature: data and computation locality.

OSL shaders are awesome compared to RSL shaders, as OSL gives all control to the renderer, which allows it to do a lot of optimization (such as using the renderers own importance sampling strategies).

There are people who do nothing but develop looks and write shaders all day everyday, and others who create and manage distributed rendering pipelines.

It's not clear how to access this new hardware (some OpenGL extension?), but they do mention that their chip gives shaders the ability to cast rays.