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I was looking through some shader videos and wanted to see how hard it is to write one, and after some research I am now confused.

Are shades just basically fancy filters like black and white filters and those shitty Snapchat colour filters or is there a particular trait with shaders that diffferes them from filters that I am missing?

I always thought that shaders were all about ray tracing/marching and obtaining the effects that way.

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    shaders are gpu programs. usually doing calculations on vertices and pixels, since that's what gpu was designed for, but it's still just manipulating data, as any other program.

    also, i don't think conflating (snapchat) filters with shaders is a good idea. they probably do use shaders to achieve (at least some of) the filters, but it's like saying "a bucket of paint and a brush is the same as a painting".
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    if you're only starting, playing around with something like ShaderGraph in unity and then viewing the generated code might help you understand... how they work and how the code works, abd what all is possible with it.

    also look up something on "gpu-based physics simulation" or "gpu-based machine learning". that would be like a quickstart guide into the true power of shaders ;)
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