What's the best tool you can use to learn to program shaders?

I've recently been doing some DirectX 10 work and I'm looking to move to DirectX 11 and Shader Model 5.0. I've written a few very simple shaders in the past and I'm looking to broaden my horizons and venture into more complex shaders. My question is sort of multi-fold:

1. What is the best tool out there to program shaders with? I've only used visual studio and SOME FX composer - read: enough to open it up and look at it.

2. Does the brand of gfx card effe开发者_如何学Goct what type of shaders you can program?

   • The reason I ask is that it seems like Nvidia has way better tools and ATI seems to have cancelled RenderMonkey. I don't seem to see any replacement for it? Am I wrong?

3. Sort of the same question as #1, but can you use cross vendor tools if you just intend to write DirectX shaders and not vendor specific?

   • If you need to go vendor specific, does Nvidia generally have better tools? I'd really like to ATI right now, as they seem to be the best bang for the buck (and I have an AMD board) - but am hesitant becasue I mostly use my gfx cards for programming.

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What is your ultimate goal? If you'd just like to know a little more about shading, or if you are an artist or technical artist, then 1. FX Composer and RenderMonkey are pretty good.

If you are a programmer and you'd like to make graphics engines, then 1. you should use a text editor, because the shader is just one small part of a graphics engine. Past a certain low level of sophistication, shader constants and certain textures need to be created on-the-fly in a language like C++.

two. The brand of graphics card doesn't affect what kind of shaders you can program at all nowadays.

three. Cross-vendor tools are fine.

Though you didn't address this issue in your question, I feel I should mention: not only are shaders today just a small part of a graphics engine, but their role will diminish soon as focus shifts to deferring work until "post-processing" using "compute." A shader will soon typically output abstract terms like albedo and normal, not color. Its relevance to art will decline.