Well, as a first news post, I found this rather interest article through /. that goes into some terrific detail on nVidia"s new High-Level Pixel and Vertex Shader language.
Graphics giant NVIDIA today announced Cg, an initiative with participation from Microsoft to create a cross-platform, hardware-independent, high-level Pixel and Vertex Shader programming language.
Writing code for existing Pixel and Vertex Shaders is akin to writing assembly code. Eventually it"ll work but it"s a laborious, low-level exercise with almost no comprehensibility if someone else works on the code. Enter Cg, a high-level "C"-like language that will provide greater accessibility to the tricky bit twiddling.