Shaders are part of the computer graphics rendering pipeline. They're small applicaitons that tell the computer how to render and shade objects in a scene. This includes calculating the color and light values for a given object so that it can be shown on screen. Ontop of that, shaders are used to create many of the special and post-processing effects that you see in games today.

Shaders are part of the computer graphics rendering pipeline. They're small applications that tell the computer how to render and shade objects in a scene. This includes calculating the color and light values for a given object so that it can be shown on screen. Ontop of that, shaders are used to create many of the special and post-processing effects that you see in games today.

In modern game engines, (Including Unity) shaders run in a programmable GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) rendering pipeline, which allow them to run in parallel and do many shader calculations very quickly.