I remember writing OpenGL fragment shader assembly for the Radeon 9600. The hardware had a 32-instruction limit for shader programs, so it was kind of fun tryin

I remember writing OpenGL fragment shader assembly for the Radeon 9600. The hardware had a 32-instruction limit for shader programs, so it was kind of fun trying to do as much as possible in one render pass. Comparing that experience with the complexity of the instruction set described in this article, it's easy to appreciate how far GPUs have come in 19 years.