# Effects and shaders

Stride uses a programmable shading pipeline. You can write [custom shaders](custom-shaders.md), create @'Stride.Graphics.Effect's from them, and use them for drawing. The @'Stride.Rendering.EffectSystem' class provides an easy way to load an effect.

## Load an effect

Use:

```cs
var myEffect = EffectSystem.LoadEffect("MyEffect").WaitForResult();
```

You can then bind the effect as [pipeline state](../low-level-api/pipeline-state.md).

An effect also often defines a set of parameters. To set these, you need to [bind resources](../low-level-api/resources.md) before drawing.

## Shaders

Shaders are authored in the [Stride's shading language](shading-language/index.md), which is an extension of `HLSL`. They provide true composition of modular shaders via [inheritance](shading-language/shader-classes-mixins-and-inheritance.md), shader [mixins](shading-language/composition.md) and [automatic weaving of shader in-out attributes](shading-language/automatic-shader-stage-input-output.md).

## Effects

[Effects](effect-language.md) in Stride use C#-like syntax to further combine shaders. They provide conditional composition of shaders to generate effect permutations.

As some platforms can't compile shaders at runtime (eg iOS, Android, etc), effect permutation files (`.sdeffectlog`) are used to enumerate all permutations ahead of time.

## Target everything

Stride shaders are converted automatically to the target graphics platform — either plain HLSL for Direct3D, `GLSL` for OpenGL, or `SPIR-V` for Vulkan platforms.

For mobile platforms, shaders are optimized by a GLSL optimizer to improve performance.

> [!NOTE]
> Converting to OpenGL Compute shaders are not supported in SDSL yet.

## In this section

* [Effect language](effect-language.md)
* [Shading language](shading-language/index.md)
    - [Shader classes, mixins and inheritance](shading-language/shader-classes-mixins-and-inheritance.md)
    - [Composition](shading-language/composition.md)
    - [Compile shaders](compile-shaders.md)
    - [Templates](shading-language/templates.md)
    - [Shader stage input/output automatic management](shading-language/automatic-shader-stage-input-output.md)
* [Custom shaders](custom-shaders.md)