Pixel Shaders first popped up in WPF around .NET 3.5 and were a replacement for the very slow BitmapEffects. This allowed developers to make GPU accelerated shader effects, such as Blur and DropShadow. When Silverlight started picking up steam, they were also added, but as a CPU (concurrent) rasterized version. Since then pixel shader effects have all but disappeared from XAML frameworks such as W