This is a superset of shader model 6.0 that adds support for SV_ViewID, barycentric semantics and the GetAttributeAtVertex intrinsic. This is a superset of shader model 5.1 with some deprecated language elements and with the addition of wave intrinsics and 64-bit integers for arithmetic. This is functionally very similar to Shader Model 5 the main change is more flexibility in resource selection by allowing indexing of arrays of descriptors from within a shader. This is a superset of shader model 4 and adds new resources, compute shaders and tessellation. It adds new shader profiles to target geometry shaders. It has been designed using a common-shader core that gives a common set of features to all programmable shaders, which are only programmable using HLSL. This is a superset of the capabilities in Shader Model 3, except that Shader Model 4 doesn't support the features in Shader Model 1. Adds new intrinsics and increases limits on registers and instructions. It introduced vertex and pixel shaders to the first implementation of the programmable pipeline.

This was the first shader model created in DirectX. Shader model versions gradually introduce new processing stages, relax constraints and introduce a superset of capabilities.

The currently targetted shader model can be accessed from within the shader code using the Predefined Version Macros _SHADER_TARGET_MAJOR and _SHADER_TARGET_MINOR. Each level allows an application or game to target a well-known set of functionality for development, and allows hardware and driver developers to target that same description for support. The HLSL shader model is a versioning approach indicating which new features are added to the language.

Shader model 3.0 windows 10