Hi, I just got the book The CG Tutorial. It so far looks like a pretty good book, but it's got one giant problem, it never explains how to run the shaders, or test them, or anything. I downloaded the CG toolkit, and I was wondering if there's any program that lets you plug in your CG code, compile it, and test it on a scene? I'm looking to make CG shaders just for fun, so there won't be any program I'll be using them in, so something like that described above would be ideal. I know about FX composer, but none of the shaders supplied by the CG tutorial work in it, does anyone have any ideas? Any help is greatly appreciated!

when you download the toolkit, it comes with the examples with both D3D and OpenGL (actually, there are only a few on D3D, but enough to get you started).

look at this folder:

C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\Cg\examples

cheers!

re-reading your post, i realize that you ask for something a little different from what i answered..
Well, actually, AFAIK, you CANT do that with CG. But you DO can do it with CGFX.
Check out the nvidia shader library (you can access them via the fx composer).
You can do shaders for fun in that format an test them in the fx composer.

cheers.