If you go back to what is arguably the earliest hardware that at all resembled the modern 3D pipeline (it predates DirectX, and the DirectX pipeline was greatly

If you go back to what is arguably the earliest hardware that at all resembled the modern 3D pipeline (it predates DirectX, and the DirectX pipeline was greatly inspired by it, according to some article I read on here a while back by one of the guys responsible for the DirectX project), the original Play Station, it mostly consisted of two parts: a "geometry engine" embedded in the CPU which acted like a cross between an SIMD unit and a modern vertex shader ^(it took as inputs a vertex, a light vector, and a transformation matrix, and produced a transformed vertex with an associated color according to a basic diffuse lighting calculation), and a "dumb" rasterizer chip (which knew nothing about 3D, it just took basic 2D/"screenspace" vertex coordinates, color values, and texture coordinates, and naively combined them with no regard to perspective correctness). There was a clear distinction here where the "vertex shader" did the "smart" work to produce a color based on a simple lighting model, and the "pixel shader" did absolutely nothing but interpolate whatever vertex colors and texture values that had been supplied to it, then combine them straightforwardly to produce a final pixel color. Similarly, if you look at early, pre-shader PC graphics cards, like the Voodoo, these cards (kinda like the Play Station) had nothing resembling a vertex shader, and had no knowledge of lighting calculations. They required the host CPU (acting as our "vertex shader") to provide them with completely lit and transformed vertices that they could then rasterize by naively interpolating and combining whatever color and texture coordinate values the host program had supplied to them. Given this history, I contest the idea that it's clearly the pixel shader's responsibility to deal with all color and lighting calculations, and the vertex shader's responsibility is merely to geometrically transform vertices in space. I still agree that "shader" is a stupid and confusing term (I was learning about this stuff for the first time not long ago, and realizing that "shaders" were just GPU programs was an "aha! moment" for me too), I'm just disagreeing with the first paragraph of your original post. ^ it could do other stuff, like transform matrices to implement a basic matrix stack, but that run-on sentence was already running on long enough...